


You Drive Through the Dust

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Series: Every Marine a Wolfbrother [7]
Category: Generation Kill, Iskryne Series - Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Animal Death, Bitches Get Shit Done, Dubious Consent, Harm to Children, Hunting, Iraq, Kuwait, Mates, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Minor Injuries, Multi, Non-Monogamy, Pack Dynamics, Pining, Psychic Wolves, The Grooming Standard, The Old Ways, Wolf Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 09:52:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 117,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>August 2002-August 2003. Nate and Bo lead their platoon to war and bring them home again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Camp Pendleton, August-November 2002

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to my team of betas: templemarker, trinity_clare, riverlight, Olivia Circe, thfourthvine, my assorted advance-readers and cheerleaders, and Iulia forever as always! And thanks also to anyone I forgot. It's been a long road, and I have had a lot of help along the way.
> 
> More detailed warnings for each chapter are in the end notes. Please let me know if I missed something that should be tagged/warned!
> 
> Title is from [Dutch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF3EcrRXO50) by Dessa:  
>  _But you can't play for keeps if you never draw blood_  
>  _You just brace and you breathe, you drive through the dust_

Nate was leaning over a desk, comparing a mission plan to the relevant map sheet, when he felt a ping through the pack-sense. It was like a tap on the shoulder or the sound of a radio clicking on in the instant before sound started coming through. Nate straightened up to something like attention immediately. His CO might be anywhere, but he was now also effectively in the room with Nate.

 _Nate?_ Captain Schwetje's voice, through the pack-sense, came laden with so much _don't worry, not urgent_ that it was almost diffident.

 _Sir_ , Nate returned, projecting back alert focus both from himself and from Bo. She'd already taken her leave of the wolves of Bravo's Second Platoon and was homing in on Nate.

 _My location, when you have a minute,_ Schwetje directed, though again with so little force that it felt like an invitation. The words were accompanied by an impression of Schwetje's current position, about ten meters from where Nate sat in the headquarters building. _I've got some personnel things to run by you._

 _Yes, sir,_ Nate affirmed, choking back the sense of urgent eagerness he put through the pack-sense to something merely dutiful. Bravo Two currently consisted of Nate and three junior enlisted men, and had for nearly a month now. With the Mountain Warfare course drawing to a close Nate was--to say the least--eager to find out when he might have his platoon at something resembling full strength. 

_Would now be convenient, sir?_

Nate forced himself not to count seconds while Schwetje hesitated. He was starting to get used to the pause that ensued every time he asked his commanding officer a direct question.

_Sure, Nate. Now's fine._

_Be right there, sir._ Nate was already on his feet; he held himself to a leg-stretching walk as he covered the distance to the captain's temporary office. When he got there, Bo, who was constrained by entirely different standards of dignity, was already outside the door, almost dancing back and forth with bright-eyed anticipation. Keeping just three wolves in line had gotten boring for her about three and a half weeks ago.

Nate knocked on the door, sending a ping through the pack-sense at the same time. The inevitable pause followed; Nate straightened his blouse and Bo shook herself, shedding dust in a small cloud. 

"Come in!" Nate entered with Bo on his heels and snapped off a salute, which Schwetje returned precisely. Bo bowed to Yellowjacket, a pale tawny wolf who was, like most recon wolves, nearly Bo's height and about fifty pounds heavier. Yellowjacket accepted Bo's greeting with a rather amiable lick on the nose.

Schwetje resumed his seat first, and Yellowjacket returned to his brother's side of the desk to flop down on the ground. Bo lay down next, beside the chair Nate would take. Nate sat last, keeping an eye on Bo. She lay with her legs gathered compactly under her, tail curled tightly around her rump, her ears pricked up and her eyes turned up to Nate. 

Nate, as he often did lately, quietly pushed _patience_ through their bond as he took his seat. 

He then contradicted himself by speaking up before Schwetje could start an excruciating exchange of idle conversation on some other topic. "There was a personnel matter, sir?"

"Yeah," Schwetje frowned down at some files on the desk, tapping his fingers on them. "I'm working on assigning NCOs, and I wanted to tell you, first of all, we tracked down a gunnery sergeant for you with a sister. Mike Wynn, his sister's name is Ash. Saw combat way back in Mogadishu--they're real good. Probably DI material one day."

Nate nodded, allowing a little of his sense of relief to leak into the pack-sense. 

Schwetje smiled at that. Officer-bitches like Bo were rare enough that finding a gender-matched platoon NCO was noticed as a special point of accommodation. It was unavoidably necessary--a male/female officer/NCO pair at the head of a platoon was the quickest way to get wolves reverting to the Old Ways and a feral pack structure, which could be somewhere between a headache and a disaster depending on when and where it went down--but it was a lot easier to locate two males for a platoon than two females. Nate and Bo had gotten lucky with their first platoon, where they'd replaced another officer-bitch; Keith and Silver had already been there waiting for them. It took a particular temperament for a bitch to be assertive enough to keep her platoon in line as Gunny's sister without challenging her lieutenant's sister for dominance, but Nate would trust Gunnery Sergeant Wynn and Ash, and whoever had chosen them for him and Bo. 

"For your team leaders--you went out on that patrol with Sergeant Patrick's team, right? You worked with him and Reyes?"

Nate nodded, even though working with them had consisted solely of Nate and Bo shadowing them through the trees. They'd very politely used Nate's call sign when reporting in, but that was as much authority as he'd exerted over the team. He'd been there to observe, nothing more. 

Bo certainly remembered the experience. She'd been a lot more frustrated than Nate had about not being in charge, though she'd shared his slightly awed respect for the smooth, silent expertise of the men and wolves. She leapt ahead from the question to the conclusion that she might get to have Patrick and Reyes's brothers--Hurricane and her old shipmate Sandy--in her platoon, and wriggled all over with delight. She didn't stir from her spot on the floor, though; Yellowjacket was still sprawling on his side of the desk.

"We'd be happy to work with them again, sir," Nate offered.

Schwetje nodded. "Shieldmates, so you can have Patrick as a team leader and Reyes as his ATL. They've earned a rotation together, after being apart in Afghanistan."

Nate nodded. Their relationship had been evident in the time he spent with them. They hadn't been visibly demonstrative, and he didn't think any of the handful of words he'd heard the team speak had been exchanged between Reyes and Patrick, but the extra bond between them had been tangible in the pack-sense, nearly as strong--and as private--as the bond between man and wolf. Their brothers obviously were in full accord with their choice.

That would give Nate a platoon NCO and leadership for a team, which with his three junior enlisted men would bring his platoon up to a single full team's strength.

Schwetje frowned, tapping his fingers against a file again. "This one's an actual question, Nate, and I want you to know that you can say no, okay? You can say no, and that's fine."

Nate took a step back in the pack-sense, closing himself and Bo off more than usual in preparation for whatever Schwetje was about to say. 

Sensing Nate's retreat, the captain grimaced and nodded, then took a breath. "Brad Colbert and Frost."

Nate was so completely thrown that he reached out instinctively into the pack-sense to assure himself he'd heard that right, that Schwetje really meant it. He found nothing but solemn sincerity and concern, and backed away again, closing himself off and forcing himself to keep his thoughts off his face as the reality of it sunk in.

Brad and Frost, in their platoon. 

He looked down at Bo, reaching for her. She pressed her muzzle into the palm of his hand and it was like touching a live wire, like closing a circuit. Bo sent him, surprisingly sharp, her memory of the memories Frost had shared with her during their cas-evac, Frost's recon team hunting in the hills of Afghanistan. Even if they weren't together on patrol this time, Brad and Frost's team would be _their_ team, under _their_ command. 

Nate did feel, for his own part, a glimmer of disappointment. Having Brad as a TL would mean he definitely couldn't have Brad any other way; singling out one team leader of three would be unavoidably prejudicial to good order, and with the special exception of his platoon NCO--who would be just barely under his command, given a lieutenant's normal reliance on his gunnery sergeant--the men of his own platoon were off-limits to Nate. If Brad were a recon E-5 in any other unit no one would mind him and Nate getting up to anything they wanted to, but the rules against abuse of power were in place for good reasons, and Nate wasn't going to start off his new command by even considering violating them.

But it was hard to regret the loss of that possibility when Bo was so desperately excited to be working with them, hunting beside them, fighting beside them. Any other arrangement, even if it allowed Nate and Brad to mess around together in their rare off-hours, would have meant rarely seeing them at all. This meant they'd be training together, deploying together. Even on a deployment, with the platoon broken up into teams carrying out their own recon missions, Brad and Frost would be there in the platoon's pack-sense. They would always be within Bo's reach, and so within Nate's. And no matter who else wound up in Nate's platoon, he'd have faith in his men and wolves, because he'd have one of the best team leader pairs in recon.

"Nate?" Schwetje said, and Nate blinked and looked away from Bo, taking his hand off her and straightening up as she curled herself back down to the floor. 

Schwetje was frowning, and even though Nate was holding himself carefully out of the pack-sense--his sense of disbelieving delight in his luck was downright unprofessional, and neither he nor Bo were going to be able to rein it in in the next minute or two--he could read that same concern Schwetje had been feeling before.

"Nate, I know you didn't put them down on your exclusion list, but you probably weren't thinking they might end up in your platoon. If you don't want them, just say the word. I'll put them in Third Platoon and you'll hardly have to see them. Captain McGraw and Banner can handle them."

"No," Nate said, too sharply, and Schwetje looked taken aback. 

"Sir, sorry, sir--" Nate looked down and met Bo's gaze, concentrating on their access to the pack-sense, opening it just enough to let their mutual sense of _happy surprise_ leak out at a dignified volume. "We'll be glad to work with them, sir."

Schwetje smiled, and Nate felt his immediate sense of relief and _problem solved_. "No favoritism, now, Nate."

Nate dared to crack a smile. "No, sir. Absolutely professional. But as short as our previous acquaintance was, we know Sergeant Colbert and Frost's reputation. We couldn't ask for a better TL pair."

Schwetje nodded, his smile falling away. "You're sure, Nate? You're sure you can command them just the same as any other man and wolf?"

Nate glanced down at Bo, pressing the question at her. Frost was the father of her pups--would that change things for her? 

Bo gave him a rather exasperated push of thought--she'd sent it before, whenever he was making things too human. Pups were pups, and the pups were weaned and gone. Breeding was breeding, and now wasn't the time. Frost was--

Bo gave him another memory, the image Frost had once teased her with, of her infantry platoon all clustering around her feet like pups. Bo thought now, triumphantly, of Frost being one of the pups at her feet, picking him up by his scruff and setting him where she wanted him to go, shoving him off on a mission with an authoritatively maternal shove on the rump.

Nate grinned, and on the other side of the desk Schwetje laughed. Nate looked up, startled to realize that Schwetje--Yellowjacket, Nate could feel Yellowjacket's amusement at the image--had picked that image out of the pack-sense, even as much as Nate and Bo had been closed off from it. 

Nate tightened up his barriers, Bo automatically following suit, thinning their pack-sense contact with Schwetje and Yellowjacket down to the minimal link that respect for rank required of them. Nate nodded firmly. "Yes, sir. We can command them. We look forward to it."

"Good," Schwetje said, picking up a file and moving it over to another pile, dropping it with a very final slap. "They're all yours."

* * *

With everyone in one place for Mountain Warfare training, Nate and Bo and their opposite numbers in Alpha were able to complete the transfer of Reyes and Sandy and Patrick and Hurricane the old-fashioned way. That pleased all the wolves, and Nate knew it was easier on the men, too. 

Nate and Bo had spent their long summer of training between unit assignments, drifting outside the pack-sense except for what they formed with training units, always knowing it was only temporary. He wouldn't wish even a day of that isolation and uncertainty on any of his men, and he was glad to be able to prevent it for Reyes and Patrick, though he supposed that as shieldmates they would suffer less from it than most.

They did it up right: Nate and Bo brought along the rest of the platoon--PFC Christeson and Dusty, Lance Corporals Stafford and Lilley with Scooby and Eagle, respectively--to the designated neutral meeting area, a little way from either unit's barracks. Reyes and Patrick followed their platoon commander, their brothers at their heels, and Nate grinned as he watched Bo stand tall, refusing to be intimidated by the Alpha platoon's superior numbers. The whole platoon wasn't even present, but there were still a solid dozen men and wolves there to see the sergeants off.

The actual handoff took just a few seconds. The Alpha lieutenant's brother touched noses with Hurricane, then with Sandy. Their successive releases from the pack-sense were tangible in the overarching pack-sense that made up recon. 

Bo was already extending eager invitation through the pack-sense, but she stood her ground at Nate's side, waiting for them to come to her. Patrick and Reyes each shook their former lieutenant's hand, and then they crossed the invisible line in the dust into Bravo Two's territory. 

Bo danced forward to meet Sandy and Hurricane, snapping her teeth eloquently as she directed them, _together, together, closer_. The wolves stood obediently shoulder to shoulder, heads together, and Bo came to a solemn halt before them and touched noses with both of them at once, drawing both wolves and their brothers into her pack-sense as a single unit. Nate heard--and felt--the quiet surprise of the rest of Bravo Two at the ease with which she absorbed the new wolves into the pack-sense. Even Alpha's lieutenant looked reluctantly impressed.

Sergeant Patrick was grinning, and Rudy was laughing, pumping his fist in delight. Hurricane and Sandy bowed together, and Bo cheerfully washed both their faces and then led them off to meet the younger wolves. Nate was grinning, too, reaching out a hand to shake with each of his new NCOs even as the feeling of them spread through the pack-sense. Patrick was quiet and steady, content to let Reyes draw everyone's attention but confident in his own authority. Rudy was just as distinctive as he'd seemed when Nate only heard him out loud, exuberant and earnest and somehow managing to be on his Own Fucking Program in perfect sync with recon. 

Both of them were, rightly, orienting their attention more to the junior enlisted men, who would make up their team for the time being, than toward Nate, who would channel most of his pack-sense awareness of them through Gunny Wynn once they got linked up. They each shook Nate's hand, accompanied with the equivalent pack-sense contacts, and then moved on. Hurricane and Sandy, introduced to the junior wolves, were doing the same.

Bo returned to Nate's side, standing at a little distance from the men. 

_Sergeant Patrick_ , Nate said, letting his words be broadcast to all the men just as if he'd shouted them out loud. All five turned to him, but Sergeant Patrick took a step forward.

_Sir?_

Nate nodded. _Get your team back to base and get settled. Bo and I have some things to do._

_Sir._

Patrick saluted, including with it a warm sense of respect in the pack-sense. Nate returned the gesture with equal goodwill, and then turned and led Bo away from the barracks, toward one of the lonelier areas of the base. Bo knew what Nate was looking for and took the lead, steering them away from every occupied space, until they reached a sheltered hillside out of sight, smell, and hearing of everyone. 

Bo closed down their pack-sense connection with the rest of the platoon to mere awareness of their location and condition, and then for a moment she just stood there at Nate's side. Their own bond seemed to open up wider, or maybe it was just the chance to actually pay attention to each other, to acknowledge what had been stirring irrepressibly in the back of both their minds and now flooded openly between them.

Nate dropped to his knees, laughing, and dug his fingers into the fur at her shoulders until he felt her wanting to pull away. He sat back on his heels. _Go, go._

Bo bolted off down the hill, barking like a pup, jumping for joy. Nate straightened up to watch her, grinning so widely his own face hurt. It had been a long summer, and they'd had to get through it in the absence of a pack of their own. Bo had weaned her first litter and sent them off into the world to find their own brothers. They'd survived BRC and Combat Water Safety and SERE. Bo wasn't the same wolf she'd been six months ago, and Nate couldn't help being relieved, as well as glad, to see her cut loose with puppy antics when she had the time and space.

She came romping back to Nate after a few minutes, jumping up to put her paws on his shoulders. Nate put his hands on her shoulders, though she didn't need steadying, and let her lick his face a while, until her wild, incandescent pack-happiness settled into a single focus: _Frost Frost Frost Frost_.

"Hey," Nate said aloud, shifting his hands to either side of Bo's jaw, halting the facewash. "Hey. Not just Frost."

 _Ash_ , he told her in the pack-sense, and since he had no idea what Ash looked or smelled like, he pushed the memory of Silver at her, reminding her how Silver and Keith had guided them, stood beside them, run the platoon in their absence. 

"Frost and Brad are going to lead a team," he said quietly, shaking her a little. "Just like Patrick and Hurricane. They're going to be with their team. Ash and Wynn are for us. Ash will be with us."

He didn't have to say the rest in words, though he pushed it through the pack-sense to be sure she understood how concerned he was. They were likely to meet Ash and Wynn and Frost and Brad all at the same time, when they returned to Camp Pendleton. Bo couldn't get distracted by Frost; she had to give the right of precedence to the senior NCO pair, to Ash and Wynn. They had to be brought into the pack-sense first, even if it was easier to pull Frost in at a distance, having connected with him before. Nate and Bo couldn't start their partnerships with Wynn and Ash by passing them over for a junior wolf and team leader. 

Bo huffed in his face. _Of course._ Wolves understood seniority and place-in-the-pack at least as well as men did. She understood Ash's role, and Frost's. It didn't diminish her happiness at the upcoming reunion, and she'd never be careless like this in public. Only with her brother.

"Of course," Nate agreed out loud, smiling again. "Go on, then, we've got a few more minutes before anybody needs--"

Bo didn't let him finish before she threw them both sideways, dragging him into the dirt before she took off running. Nate gave in and chased her down the hill and back up again like he was a kid again, too--like he had any hope of catching her when he was laughing so hard.

* * *

Thirty miles out from Pendleton, Nate felt a ping through the pack-sense. Not the close pack, neither his own platoon nor coming down from the company level; this came through the wider pack-sense of Recon, and it wasn't intended for him. It hadn't originated with a human. It was Frost, reaching out for Bo.

No. It was Frost _offering_ himself to Bo. It was an unobtrusive contact, diffident, correctly submissive. There was no content but the fact of the communication, the sense of his presence. Frost was available to her, ready to be brought into the pack-sense of her platoon at Bo's convenience. 

Nate looked down at Bo, who heaved a long sigh and pushed herself up to sit between his legs, her head on his thigh, her nose tucked into the crease of his hip. She gave him a long-suffering look, and Nate shared with her the wordless, resigned sense of necessary patience. Bo wouldn't reject the contact, wouldn't push Frost away when he had offered himself. Neither would she take him up on his offer. She would wait. They would all wait. 

Twenty miles out, Frost's ping turned into something like a nudge. Nate had the strong sense impression of Frost bowing so closely at Bo's feet that his paws were between hers, so that she couldn't take a step without acknowledging him. 

Bo gave another sigh. Nate watched it travel through her body, her shoulders heaving between his thighs. He put his hand on the back of her neck. 

Frost wasn't budging, and Nate knew that in another few minutes somebody's patience was going to run out. Wolves weren't good at extended standoffs, and their communication relied heavily on gesture and performance; Bo deigning to communicate with Frost now, even to tell him to go away, would launch a complicated tangle of implications. It would take a human to say something that meant only the words that were said.

Nate reached out through the open connection, past Frost to Brad, with a single word. _Wait._

It was enough to get Brad's attention, and Nate felt the contact between the wolves attenuate within seconds. He rubbed his thumb over the base of Bo's ear and remembered the day they had first met Frost and Brad: Frost had been antagonizing Bo, and Brad had convinced him to stop with a look and a few seconds' silent communication. 

Bo accepted the memory with interest, sharing back her own rather jumbled recollection of the cas-evac flight. Nate smiled even as he shifted uncomfortably. Bo's memory was heavy on the sensation of those hours, and he didn't really need the twitchy anticipation of almost-in-heat on top of his present impatience to meet his NCOs and get the platoon settled. He remembered all too well how things with him and Brad had proceeded after that, and he didn't need to be thinking of that now.

Nate forced his attention onto the soothing pointlessness of a head count, reaching out through the pack-sense to check on each of his men. Nate smiled--and felt Bo share his amusement--when they touched Patrick and Hurricane and realized they were doing the same. Nate left Patrick to it and carried on with his own checks, few though they were, easy though it would have been to just turn his head and look at them all. 

Rudy was meditating. Lilley was staring out the window. Stafford was lecturing Christeson about something, and Christeson was caught between a fear of seeming gullible and an eagerness to believe everything Stafford said. Nate offered him a quiet touch of reassurance; Stafford was being entirely truthful, and even accurate so far as Nate knew, about dive training.

Nate returned his attention to Bo, and she confirmed that all the wolves were as healthy as the men. Hurricane and Sandy had traded places at some point in the last ten minutes. Scooby was irritated that Dusty had joined Stafford and Christeson's conspiracy to keep Scooby from licking the stitches on his foreleg, which constituted the only injury the platoon had suffered in its last training exercise. Eagle was asleep with his head in his brother's lap, dreaming of running.

A few minutes later they came into pack-sense range of the northern edge of Camp Pendleton. The preserve there was occupied by wild packs--never-bonded and no-longer-bonded wolves--and they inevitably reached out to try to connect with the wolves and men who passed near their territory. Approaching Pendleton from the north always meant running a gauntlet of undisciplined contact. 

Nate closed his eyes and settled both hands on Bo, helping her concentrate on policing the pack-sense of her own platoon. Nate could feel her interposing herself, blocking access down to a mere awareness of the wolves' locations. Bo could feel--Nate could feel through her--something like a collective sigh of the platoon's relief at being so well shielded, but neither let it distract them from Bo's work. 

And then, with a sudden burst of overkill energy--like the last step out of a sucking bog and onto dry land--they were past the nearest approach of the preserve to the road and in among the strong, orderly pack-sense of the great mass of men and wolves at Pendleton.

The instant the doors of the bus opened at Camp Margarita, recon's stomping grounds within Pendleton, Nate was aware--and Bo was conscious of nothing but--that their soon-to-be pack members were awaiting them nearby. Nate looked around and spotted Frost sitting statue-still beside Brad; logically the red-tawny wolf standing alertly just ahead of Frost and Brad would be Ash, and the man with her would be Gunnery Sergeant Wynn. That left the man and wolf flanking Wynn and Ash on the other side still unexplained.

Nate pushed a query at his CO, carefully leashing himself to politeness and a hint of confusion. 

Schwetje, riding at the front of the bus and already standing to exit, turned his head and said, "Oh, yeah, your other team leader is here, too. Lovell and Blue." 

His casual tone matched his projection through the pack-sense: a startlingly wolfish unconcern for things not immediately present. Nate couldn't have done anything differently if he'd known he was meeting a third man along with Wynn and Brad; why tell him?

Nate gave a clipped nod that hopefully looked calm and then looked down at Bo. This piecemeal assembly of a platoon was harder on her than stepping in at the top of an established unit had been last year, but of course she was undaunted. Knowing there were a third man and wolf waiting to be taken into her platoon only made her more eager to get out there and bring them all in from the cold. 

Schwetje and Yellowjacket preceded them from the bus, but Schwetje quickly waved them off toward their men. Schwetje knew as well as any wolfbrother that men stranded outside the pack-sense weren't to be left waiting on formalities. 

Nate reached back as he headed across the parking lot. _Patrick, with us. Rudy, take your team to the barracks, see if we've gotten any more men assigned in our absence._

 _Sir_ came back through the pack-sense in stereo, and Nate didn't have to look around to know he was obeyed. He could feel them all falling into place in the pack-sense as Bo prepared to make new additions. 

Nate let the familiar litany of inevitable mental images flash through his mind, locked away in as much privacy as he would ever have: Brad standing over him while he was kneeling naked, all but mute with need; Brad's teeth closing on the top of his shoulder as Brad fucked him; kissing Brad; lying dazed on the floor of the heat-shack with Frost and Bo between them, holding Brad's hand. Overlaying all those mere images, mere facts, was the pack-sense they'd shared, wide-open and utterly immersive, leaving nowhere to hide. 

Nate pushed that away as he walked. Not present, not important. They were here in Oceanside now. They were Bravo Two, not Nate and Brad and Bo and Frost in a heat-shack.

Bo stopped short at a convenient demarcating crack in the pavement and stood at Nate's side. The three waiting men started forward, making their salutes to Nate as they did, and Nate returned them before Ash reached Bo.

Bo touched noses with Ash at once, opening the pack-sense to her and giving her her rightful place as the platoon NCO's sister. Nate breathed a silent sigh of relief, meeting Wynn's--Mike's--eyes as he did and seeing his own expression reflected back. Bo and Ash fit together with a smooth sense of inevitability, and balancing the pack-sense was made instantly easier with another bitch on board. Mike's presence in the pack-sense was likewise instantly comfortable, and Nate knew he was once again lucky in the men under his command.

Mike stepped forward to shake Nate's hand, while Bo combined licking Ash's face with herding Ash to a place at Bo's side. Ash automatically shifted a half-step back, taking Bo's flank, and Mike moved into place at Nate's shoulder. 

Bo turned her attention to the remaining men and wolves, and gave a soft _whuff_ in the direction of Lovell and Blue, who wasn't blue at all but an ordinary gray. Blue didn't hesitate before coming forward to be folded into the pack-sense, though Nate thought he saw Lovell flick a sideways glance before he followed.

Blue fit into place in the pack-sense with a familiar click; Lovell and Blue had served before with Mike and Ash, and Ash's comfort with them complemented Bo's innate ease in managing the pack-sense. Nate found he was grinning as he shook Lovell's hand, and Lovell grinned back before he stepped aside, taking up a position near Patrick, and leaving just Brad and Frost facing them. 

Frost was sitting again, rigid at Brad's side. Waiting, as ordered. Brad looked slightly less frozen, meeting Nate's gaze with a slightly questioning smile. Nate nodded, and Brad looked down--must have told Frost the wait was over--and without anyone moving a muscle Nate felt it happen. Frost offered himself and Bo made him her own almost faster than Nate could perceive, and if he hadn't been bracing himself for it for the last three days he wouldn't have had time now. 

Nate held Brad's gaze through it. He saw Brad's eyes widen slightly, saw the slight relaxation of relief go over him even as Nate felt it himself. It really was different this time, when it wasn't just them, when they weren't all caught up in Bo's heat. They were lieutenant and sergeant, each in their place.

Brad stepped forward as Frost came to Bo to be greeted, as though she had to get the scent of him for the first time. Bo gave Frost a perfunctory lick and then got her teeth into the scruff of his neck, and Brad was grinning as he offered Nate his hand.

"Sir."

Nate shook Brad's hand even as he watched Frost bowing readily under Bo's teeth. "Sergeant."

Brad was pushing warm, proper respect at him, nearly drowning out the underlying contentment and relief. It felt almost exactly like the way Patrick had first saluted him.

Nate caught Brad's name for him-- _Pappy_ \--at the same time he recognized the similarity of the feelings and the familiar congruence with which the two sergeants fit into the pack-sense. He turned slightly as he realized it, letting go of Brad's hand to look at Pappy, who had been on Brad's team in Afghanistan last year.

Brad's team had been on watch together at the _Peleliu_ 's heat-shack in December. 

Pappy's expression didn't change, and he echoed the same sense of deference and respect for Nate that he'd been projecting all along. Pappy would have recognized Nate right away--even before he'd been assigned to Nate, when Nate and Bo shadowed his team in training. He'd known who Nate was, he'd known exactly what happened, he'd _seen him_ , and....

Pappy offered a glimpse of two memories superimposed: Nate sitting in the isolation unit during the cas-evac flight, and Nate on his knees in the heat-shack, waiting while they removed the other wolf. Clothed or naked, what stood out in Pappy's sight of him was his quiet stillness, an impression of him controlling the uncontrollable. It hadn't felt anything like that from the inside, but Nate understood what he was being given.

He nodded firmly to Pappy just as Bo let Frost get back to his feet. Brad stepped around Nate to join the other NCOs, his brother at his heels. 

"Gentlemen," Nate said, looking around and picking up quiet support from Mike and a really impressive poker face from Lovell. 

Before Nate could say another word, Rudy piped up in the pack-sense with _Sir, we've got a dozen E-3s and E-4s here._

Nate looked over at Mike and felt Bo reaching simultaneously for Sandy and for Ash. From all sides, Nate could feel the threads of contact with the new wolves, who with their brothers would more than double the size of the platoon. 

Bo hesitated for an instant at his side, but Nate said aloud, "Go, go get them." 

Bo took off at a run, Ash at her heels, pushing an imperious _Stay_ at the other three wolves. Blue and Hurricane shifted, looking after them, but Frost stayed pinned to Brad's side, and all of the men had their eyes on Nate.

"There's just one thing I want to get settled before I let you get back to your teams," Nate said. "And it's easier to talk about it when my sister is distracted."

Nate watched their expressions go blank as they closed off their reactions from the pack-sense--all except Brad, who had been as braced as Nate was right from the start.

Nate smiled slightly and said, "Her name is Bo. I know you may have seen a longer written form around, and you may see it again, but my sister's name is Bo. That goes for everyone, right down to the E-2s. She doesn't consider it a familiarity or a nickname and she _will_ take it personally if anyone uses the long form."

The TLs all deigned to crack a smile. Pappy's was the most obvious, Lovell's hardest to spot, Brad's a flash of teeth, there and gone. Nate's work here was done, as far as the TLs went. 

Mike stepped up to his shoulder and said, "That's it, gents. Go find your teams."

All three saluted, and Nate returned their salutes and held his ground as they walked away. 

Mike stayed beside him. "Doesn't like Boadicea, huh." 

Nate smiled, his eyes still on the TLs. Frost had finally broken away from Brad, and was trotting alongside Hurricane, jostling him good-naturedly. "I filled out the naming paperwork the day after she chose me, which was two days after I got to TBS. And then the day after I handed in the form she decided she didn't like that spelling."

Mike huffed a laugh. "The _spelling_?"

Nate nodded. "That turns out to be an argument you can't win with a wolf, even if she's only four months old. She likes the spelling Boudicca--" Nate pushed the mental image rather than spell it out, and Mike nodded. "For whatever that's worth. The Corps won't allow me to change her written name, so we just settled on Bo." 

Nate raised a hand and half-consciously tapped his fingers against the tattoo on his chest, where that compromise was written into his skin.

Mike nodded again. Neither of them moved to follow their sergeants across the parking lot. 

Nate turned to face him, finally. "You know my history with Sergeant Colbert. Bo's history with Frost."

Mike's lips pursed into a wry smile. "Pretty much the first thing I heard about you, sir. Gunnery Sergeant Griego made sure I was fully briefed on the situation as soon as I got my orders."

Mike's voice was perfectly neutral, and his face betrayed no more than resigned amusement at the situation. Nate felt his misgiving only through the pack-sense, a wariness that matched Nate's own feelings after interacting with the company NCO, something he knew how to interpret when hearing it from another bitch's brother. There were plenty of Marines--officers and enlisted alike--who didn't believe bitches should ever be bonded to officers. They had a tendency to resolve the problem in their own minds by mentally demoting officers bonded to bitches. Nate hadn't caught Griego at anything overt, and it was early yet; there was still the chance that Nate and Bo could win him over without an open fight. Nate had to allow the possibility.

Nate nodded. "Understood."

"Colbert also insisted on making sure I understood the situation correctly," Mike added, his smile twitching slightly wider. He filled in the rest through the pack-sense: Brad had been circumspect about details, determined both to praise Nate and to assure that there were no lurking secrets for any of them to be ambushed by.

Nate nodded more sharply, but let Mike see what there was to see. Nate was just as determined to have the situation rightly understood, and thought as highly of Brad as Brad evidently did of him. He'd come out of the heat-shack liking Brad, trusting him, attracted to him, and more than anything else, wishing for a chance to work with him.

"I won't bother recovering the same ground, then," Nate said aloud. "But I--Mike, have you ever done a solo?"

Mike raised his eyebrows--not offended, but he hadn't expected Nate to take that tack. "No. Ash did three litters, all peacetime, all right here at Pendleton. All Mike Bravos."

Nate nodded. "Bo was supposed to have her first Mike Bravo here, a year and a half ago. She rejected all the wolves." Nate couldn't resist letting a glimpse of that through, to be sure Mike would understand what that had been like, and Mike grimaced and nodded. 

"She rejected the wolf she was supposed to get in December. Frost's the only wolf she's ever accepted, so Colbert is the only--" Nate stopped short of saying _Marine I've ever been fucked by_. It wasn't technically accurate, and Mike didn't need him to fill in some euphemism to understand Nate's meaning. 

"Out of all that," Mike said slowly, one eyebrow twitching up. "Colbert's the one you _didn't_ put on your exclusion list?"

Nate nodded. "We got the job done together; it was an effective match. I think we can do this. Brad must think we can do this or he'd have put me on his exclusion list by now. You're brother to a bitch, you're recon, and you've been around longer than either of us. I need to know what you think the odds are that this doesn't go bad on us."

Mike was still for several seconds, and Nate could feel him turning it over before he spoke. He understood as well as Nate did that Brad's assignment to the platoon had come from up the chain of command, and that that was no guarantee of a good outcome. It was their responsibility to make this work, now, and if Nate had to do something drastic it was best done as soon as possible.

"Bo doesn't seem bothered," Mike said, his words layered with the newness of their pack-bond, his uncertainty of that evaluation. "Frost seems like he's determined not to let on if he is bothered. And you and Brad are professionals. I've seen officers get a lot more tangled up with their men than one go-round in a heat-shack without completely fucking things up."

"We'll be going into combat," Nate pointed out. All kinds of things got all kinds of lax in peacetime, not least the rules about appropriate relationships. And their go-round in the heat-shack hadn't been quite the usual.

Mike shrugged. "I don't know what we'll be going into, Nate, and I don't know you. I know Brad. I trust his judgment, and he seems to trust yours."

Nate put his chin up. "I need you not to trust my judgment too far, Gunny. I need you to let me know if I'm fucking up as far as Sergeant Colbert--or in any other way, but especially with Brad. Privately, if we can, but I want you to know that I understand your role here. I need you to step in when you see me about to make a mistake."

Mike held his gaze in silence for several seconds, then nodded. "Thank you, sir. I'll do my best for you."

Nate nodded sharply, pushing gratitude through the pack-sense without a word. He turned to head toward their barracks--he could feel Bo's greedy delight in the new members of her platoon, and he probably shouldn't leave her on her own to push everyone around for too long--and Mike fell in at his shoulder.

"Mind you," Mike said, halfway there. "This is recon." 

He pointed out to Nate half a dozen guilty consciences flashing like beacons in the pack-sense, E-3s and E-4s nervously anticipating the arrival of their lieutenant and gunny. 

"Privacy's gonna be a bitch."

"Good thing we've got two of those, then," Nate replied.

Mike didn't deign to show much of a smile at that, but Nate could feel his answer in the pack-sense. _Damn good thing._

* * *

Bo took Nate's desire for a private pack-sense connection with Mike as a challenge. It was only a couple of days before Nate and Mike could communicate in the presence of the platoon without any of them picking up the _danger!_ signals Nate and Mike exchanged as tests. To be absolutely certain, they recruited Corporal Person, who Brad had claimed immediately as his RTO. Ray was brother to the only other bitch in the platoon, and thus strongest in the pack-sense after Bo and Ash.

With Ray and his sister, Navi, sitting directly between them, Nate and Mike exchanged a rapid-fire series of signals. They took turns showing Ray what they'd transmitted and silently tracking the signs of exactly how unnerved Ray was until, nearly a full minute before Mike expected him to--Nate had thought he could hold out even longer--he cracked. 

"Okay, this is seriously creepy, sir. Gunny. I can't hear you! That's not _natural_! Navi hears fucking _everything_!"

Nate grinned. _Price Is Right rules? Nobody wins if we both went over?_

Mike shrugged. _You can tell yourself that if you need to, Nate._

Between them, Ray's eyes went wider as he looked rapidly back and forth. "What? Oh my God, what are you saying?"

"Just calibrating, Ray," Mike said, bland and no-nonsense. 

Bo, bored with the exercise now that she knew she'd mastered it, stood up and pounced on Navi, who rolled over readily, wagging her tail like a puppy. Ash stayed at Mike's side, giving both of the younger bitches the same benevolent look. 

Ray threw his hands up and said, "Fine, fine, be secure in the fact that you can be creepy and plan shit without anyone knowing whether you're talking to each other or not. Jesus. Sir."

"Thank you for your help, Corporal," Nate returned. "You're free to go."

Ray stood up like he was spring-loaded, but he waited until Bo let Navi up before he actually went anywhere.

The acid test came later that day, while Nate was eating at the same mess table as Captain Schwetje. Mike sent him the familiar _danger! three o'clock!_ signal, and Nate, with days of practice at it, resisted looking sharply to his right. He kept his eyes on his CO instead. Captain Schwetje didn't look to his right, either, or to Nate's right. He looked directly at Nate, frowning in confusion. He didn't look for Mike at all, though he was sitting three tables away, readily visible.

Nate nodded to Schwetje and looked back down at his food, waiting for him to say something. When he hadn't after three minutes, Nate sent back privately to Mike, _danger! five o'clock!_ and glanced toward Schwetje again. Again he looked at Nate. 

He clearly knew Nate was doing something, sensed the communication in the pack-sense going on under his nose, but he didn't respond at all to the content of the message and he didn’t know who Nate was communicating with. They couldn't block him out as thoroughly as their own platoon, which made sense. Bo and Ash could much more easily manipulate their own platoon's pack-sense than their connection up the chain of command. Even so, they were effectively concealing their communication.

 _Success_ , Nate sent to Mike, this time not looking up to see whether Schwetje noticed.

 _Sir, we really need to talk about the percentage of every day you spend fantasizing about fucking PFC Christeson_. 

Nate managed--just--not to choke. Bo, who'd been sitting between his legs, bored, lifted her head and nosed at his ribs. She sent him a sharp reprimand for both his near-inhalation of his mixed vegetables and for the possibility that he was spending any time at all thinking about fucking Christeson. In Bo's view Christeson was effectively the same age as his brother Dusty, who was barely out of puppyhood and not done growing yet. 

Nate put a hand on her head and assured her that Mike was just trying to get a reaction out of him and Nate had no actual interest in making any kind of move on his teenaged PFC. Bo huffed and put her head down, sending an equally sharp sense of disapproval toward Mike for not timing his teasing so that Nate wouldn’t choke on his food. 

_Anyway_ , Nate added as an afterthought, because now and then he felt compelled to try to make Bo understand these things, _fucking Christeson would be rude to Jill._

Bo had tagged along on both of Nate's dates with Jill and categorized her, disconcertingly, with Nate's sisters among the wolfless humans she liked because Nate liked them. She thought Nate bringing up Jill when they were discussing Christeson was a baffling change of subject; clearly one had nothing to do with the other. Nate didn't press it any further, and finished his meal without any further excitement. 

Schwetje followed him out of the mess hall, sending him a wordless command to hang back. Nate obediently slowed his steps until his CO was at his side.

"Nate," he said quietly. "I noticed what you were doing there, talking privately with someone."

Nate nodded. "Gunny Wynn. Platoon commander and NCO is one of the permitted private bonds, sir."

"Oh," Schwetje said, sounding taken aback. 

In defiance of all experience, the back of Nate's neck prickled, waiting for teeth, waiting to be put in his place, for his CO to tell him he could get away with that, since the regs did technically allow it, but nothing else.

"That's okay, then," Schwetje said, and smiled as he clapped Nate on the shoulder. Nate couldn't muster up any surprise, so he tried not to think anything about it at all.

* * *

A few weeks later, with rumors multiplying through the pack-sense like bacteria in a hot tub, they were called to a briefing on the possibility of deploying to Iraq. Nate took Mike, and--since the entire platoon regarded him as unquestionably first among the team leaders--Brad. They sat in a row in the base chapel, with Ash and Bo and Frost lying under their section of the bench, curled up as small as possible. Bo sat up, head on Nate's knee, while Frost and Ash each had their heads on their brothers' feet. 

The actual briefing was just barely more authoritative than the soup of speculation that occupied the pack-sense all over the base. They were warned to prepare their families for their absence, and Nate thought of Jill, who he'd just started occasionally spending the night with, and then of his family back in Baltimore. He'd had his will and life insurance in order since before his last deployment, and Jill knew perfectly well that he was a Marine and that there was a war on, so there wasn't much more to do. 

They were warned to be ready to deploy on eight days' notice. Nate kept his eyes front as he sent Mike a dismayed estimate of the chaos that would involve, given that they had no gear for the desert, no vehicles for the kind of mission being vaguely outlined, and no idea how to cope with possible long-term exposure to chemical weapons. 

Mike, at his side, shook his head very slightly and sent back _Worse than that._

No one asked about the implication of deploying that weighed heaviest on Nate's mind. Nate glanced around, doing a head count of bitches in the room, and realized that he and Bo were the highest-ranking ones present apart from General Mattis and Prima up at the podium. 

Nate sent a query up through the pack-sense, felt Schwetje relay it, and waited for Mattis to focus on him and nod permission. "Sir, if we're to be ready to deploy on eight days' notice, will breedings be going forward?"

Mattis nodded, and shot a sense of approval--and brother-of-bitch solidarity--down through the pack-sense. Nate saw Schwetje sit up straighter at the General's attention to one of his officers. 

"Good question, Lieutenant. Breeding will go forward as normal, until and unless we receive a concrete order to deploy. Arrangements will be made when and as necessary to address the situations of bitches who are pregnant or nursing at that time. And unlike Afghanistan, if we're going into Iraq we won't be doing field breedings. BreedCom is satisfied with the efforts made in the past year to grow the wolf Corps, and they don't expect that extraordinary measures will be required going forward."

Nate nodded and took his seat again. No field breedings, at least; that would be an improvement over their last deployment. 

_Brad, you want to tell Ray?_

Brad sent _roger that_ and, at the same time, _Ray, Navi's not getting out of breeding unless and until we're actually deployed._

Ray sent back a slightly scornful lack of surprise underlain with resignation; Nate sympathized too completely to take any exception.

"I can also tell you," Mattis was saying, "that in honor of our possible deployment, this year the birthday hunt will be held at Twentynine Palms."

The reaction was muted but ranged, in the General's presence, roughly from _huh_ to near-orgasmic moto delight. Bo, between Nate's feet, was all but vibrating in place at the idea of being allowed to pursue prey through the desert like she was built to. Nate's grin at the prospect was entirely sincere; she was going to be something to see.

Ray, still communicating with Brad, picked up the announcement and responded a little more candidly. _Navi, so help me fucking God if you go into heat in November just because you don't like hunting in the fucking desert we are moving to fucking Texas when I get out and the scorpions will be bigger than you_.

Mike smiled slightly at Nate's side, and pushed helpful images of some of the more picturesque places in Texas toward Ray and Navi. Navi remained loftily unconcerned.

Nate looked down at Bo and thought that that was one thing he could be sure of: if the wolf's wishes had anything to do with it, he and Bo weren't going to see the inside of a heat-shack before Thanksgiving.

* * *

Nate felt Brad approaching a few seconds before Brad reached the door of his office; Brad was fizzing with happy excitement, leaving his enthusiasm open to the pack-sense. Nate hadn't experienced anything like it in the weeks Brad had been under Nate's command, and even though it was obviously something good it put Nate on his guard. He and Bo were both sitting up straight and watching the door when Brad leaned through, waiting for clarification of Brad's emotion.

Brad's face and his exhilaration both were suddenly blanked out when Brad saw Nate watching him with mere curiosity. Frost, at Nate's side, actually let out a tiny whine; Nate couldn't hear it, but Bo did, and transmitted it to Nate.

Nate gathered this was no time to stand on excessive ceremony. He beckoned Brad in with a gesture and a tug in the pack-sense, and spoke out loud for good measure. "Brad?"

Brad, carefully straight-faced, reached into his pocket and withdrew a folded envelope. "I assumed you'd have one of these, sir. They should have been sent out at the same time."

It was a BreedCom notice--and now, when the pups were seven months old, it could only be an outcomes notification for Bo and Frost's litter. Notifications would have gone out simultaneously to the brothers of all parents of the litter, which in this case meant just Nate and Brad. They'd have gone into the mail together at the other end; only the final distribution was different. 

The company NCO would have been pleased to deliver the good news to a TL who had jumped from six to twelve successfully bonded pups on his record. Captain Schwetje would be responsible for delivering Nate's notice, and Captain Schwetje, like most of the company, had already left the base for a weekend liberty.

Nate controlled his own expression and his presence in the pack-sense, allowing no anger, no disappointment, no resigned lack of surprise to leak out. He was proud to feel Bo, beside him, keeping a cool reserve without any prompting. 

"You know what can happen to paperwork, Sergeant."

Brad nodded, already shifting his weight backward.

Nate felt Bo shift her weight after him and dropped a hand onto the back of her neck. Supporting the chain of command was one thing, but....

"You mind if I have a look at that, Brad?"

Brad grinned again, his effervescence returning to the pack-sense in a rush as he crossed the distance to Nate. Nate stood up behind his desk and Brad leaned over the other side, tugging the sheet from the envelope and laying it flat between them. 

Bo peered over the edge of the desk for a few seconds and then leapt up onto its surface, curling herself up compactly to see the page. 

The best news was at the top of the list: _Second Lieutenant Charles Douglas_ was listed beside _Lightning (sun on sand at the ocean's edge)_. _Sun on sand_ had been the undeniable boss of the litter, and he'd taken after his mother enough to be sent to TBS just like Bo had, to find a brother among the officer candidates.

Bo was grinning wolfishly, picturing her offspring spending his puppyhood where she had spent hers. She was pleased to think he'd found a brother as suited to him as Nate was to her. 

Nate echoed her delight back to her even as he directed a grin at Brad. "That gives you, what, three out of twelve officer-quality?" 

Brad nodded. "But sir. Look." 

Halfway down the list was _Private Robert Jemison - Tanuki (sun on salt-rimed stone)_ and at the end of the line there was an asterisk.

Nate raised his eyebrows. Brad's grin was wolfishly wide. 

An asterisk was a warning; it meant that the wolf and man in question were likely to end up in the same MOS as the parent being notified. _Sun on salt_ had been the smartest of Bo's pups, and he was already being considered for recon when he wasn't even through SoI. He--or his brother, or the combination they made--had already impressed the brass. 

"Congratulations," Nate said, sliding the paper toward Brad, shushing Bo through the pack-sense as she pointed out that the litter's success had everything to do with her and Nate's care of the pups, something to do with Frost, and nothing at all with Brad. "Heading out to celebrate?"

Brad nodded. "Seems like a waste of a weekend, otherwise."

Just then Nate felt Brad get pinged through the pack-sense--Ray, full of impatient eagerness for the weekend and the party. 

"Go on," Nate said, taking a step back as Bo stood up between him and Brad. "Get to it."

Brad folded up the page and tucked it into his pocket. "I hope you're doing some celebrating of your own soon, sir."

Nate smiled, throwing his arm over Bo's shoulders, higher than his own when she stood on the desk. "Don't worry about us, Sergeant."

Brad gave a final salute, and Nate took his arm off Bo to return it. Frost bowed to Bo, who leapt down from the desk to give him a fond bite on the muzzle in parting.

When Brad and Frost were gone, Nate closed the door and closed off most of the pack-sense before he dropped to his knees to hug Bo while she wagged her tail like a pup. Bo offered him a rapid-fire series of suggestions for celebrating, most of which involved running hard after live prey. Nate ruled out seeing Jill anytime in the next two days, and made a mental note to call and explain.

* * *

Walking out of the battalion-wide briefing on the birthday hunt in the first week of November, Nate caught up to Schwetje and said, "Sir, we should really coordinate transport for the company."

Schwetje gave him a slightly wide-eyed look. "You heard what Godfather said, Nate. The birthday hunt is voluntary. Every man and his wolf need to make their own choice to be there."

Nate blinked and then nodded. The silent second half of that statement, when Godfather said it, had fairly obviously been _And if any motherfucker in this battalion chooses not to be there, I will know the reason why._

"Recon Marines can find their way through enemy territory blindfolded," Gunnery Sergeant Griego added. "They don't need their hands held to find Twentynine Palms, Lieutenant."

Nate gritted his teeth against the reassurance and forced himself not to look toward Mike, nor to mentally spell out the condescension just under the surface of Griego's words. 

"Good point, Gunny," Nate said crisply. "Sir. I'll make sure Second Platoon understands Godfather's feelings about the voluntary nature of the occasion."

Schwetje gave Nate a pleased clap on the shoulder, and Nate made his escape as quickly as he could, already silently planning with Mike who they'd have ride with who, carrying what gear, out to Twentynine Palms next week.

It was essentially a dry run for their possible-probable upcoming deployment, with slightly less logistical support than Nate expected for the real thing. All the men had had STD screens in advance of the inevitable, as Godfather phrased it, _high spirits_ of the occasion. All the wolves had had their physicals. (Ray had come out of Navi's mockingly wide-eyed. " _Guys! She's_ pregnant! _When the fuck did that happen!_ " Navi, as she had for two solid weeks by then, just looked smug.) 

They'd assembled all the gear everyone considered indispensable for the hunt: warm clothes in all-black for the desert night, water, compasses and red flashlights. Most importantly, everyone readied various components of body armor and assorted tools and weapons. Traditionally, the battle of men and wolves against trolls and wyverns had been fought at close quarters, and for a thousand years men had been arming themselves for that battle with axes and other blades. Nate's men were no different, arguing one- versus two-handed axes versus machetes and sharpening their chosen weapons.

For days beforehand Nate had nightmares that it was going to turn out to actually _be_ their deployment: they would arrive at Twentynine Palms and be loaded onto C-130s, whisked off to war with nothing but their black watch caps and hunting gear. He woke up barely past dawn on the ninth and lay still for a while, watching Jill sleep. If this was it, if he got taken away from her today and spent the next six or eight months with his platoon, half a world away from her....

Bo's nose pressed coolly against his shoulder, and Nate turned his head and smiled. _I know, I know, I'd still have you._

He reached over and scratched her a little behind the ears, letting himself feel her uncomplicated eagerness for the day and night to come. Last year on the tenth of November they'd been in Afghanistan; the birthday hunt had been indistinguishable from every other attempt by the wolves to chase down something to eat. The humans' chow the next night had been supplemented with something that was supposed to be cake, but it hadn't made the occasion much more festive. This year's birthday festivities promised to make up for that in spades. 

"Yeah," Nate whispered. "It's going to be one hell of a party."

"Hm?" Jill murmured, reaching over to him without opening her eyes. Her hand found his shoulder, and Nate captured it with his own and squeezed. "You getting up?"

"Yeah," Nate repeated a little louder. He'd mostly managed to avoid the tendency, common among Marines, to speak to Jill as if she were hard of hearing just because everything he said wasn't also being transmitted to her through the pack-sense. He did make it a point to enunciate. "We'll be on the road in half an hour."

"Hm," Jill said, picking her head up this time, smiling and scooting over to press up against him. Bo huffed against Nate's skin and moved away from the bed, heading for the kitchen. "Not much time. I'll see you tomorrow at the hotel then, huh?"

"Absolutely," Nate agreed, closing his eyes as he kissed her. His nightmares couldn't get to her unless he opened his mouth and put them into words, and there was no need to do that.

* * *

Rifles were issued at the start of the hunt with one clip each. Every Marine was a rifleman, so they wouldn't be sent out without them, but Nate had them all check to be sure their chambers were empty before they slung the weapons to the side for running. Nate noticed the TLs removing their clips entirely, tucking them into readily accessible pockets on their tac vests. Nate himself followed suit, hopefully a little more smoothly than the younger Marines. 

"Remember," Nate called out, eyeing the men who chose to keep their rifles loaded. "We do not fire if we do not have a clear shot on an identified hostile. We have the moon only for the next five hours, and after that visibility will likely be too poor for ranged weapons. These will be close-quarters fights, which is why we're all carrying hand weapons."

Rudy chose that moment to thrust a huge two-hander of an axe skyward. "The Old Ways!"

The medics were checking that everyone had a safe sheath for running with their blades. Everyone was strapping on their chosen pieces of body armor; Rudy alone was jingling softly under a layer of chain mail. Men looked up and yelled back at Rudy, variously, _oo-rah_ or, in honor of Rudy's throwback gear, _Hrotholf_!

Nate grinned and took a step back, testing the secure fit of his own vambraces. When everyone had straightened up, and the wolves were just on the edge of starting to fight each other from sheer excitement, Nate nodded to Bo. She headed for their entry point into the open desert beyond their assembly area. For a moment Bo stayed still, gathering the smells and sounds picked up by her entire pack, and then she led them into the falling darkness. The hunt was on.

* * *

Four hours into the hunt, with the half-moon hanging low in the sky and throwing stark, eerie shadows from every rock and clump of scrub, Second Platoon brought a wyvern and troll to bay against a steep, rocky hillside. Doom and Frost and Kanji and Gung Ho were arrayed before the things, holding them in place while the rest of the platoon got into position. 

Nate and Bo hung back for a moment, directing men through the pack-sense. Some had to hold back, and with the moon still up Nate wanted Pappy and Rudy and a few other marksmen up on the rocks; he wouldn't turn away the chance for a kill-shot if it was offered. Wolves and men could be seriously injured in the hunt, and Nate didn't intend to carry anyone out of the desert, or to have to explain any absences from the ball.

There was another reason to hesitate, more basic and more compelling. At least a third of Nate's men--himself included--had never seen a wyvern before. Nate had only participated in one real birthday hunt, two years before, in peacetime, and he'd only come up against a troll. He'd seen pictures and videos, but nothing really prepared a man for the reality of a wyvern: an impossibly huge snake with its hind end perched on two legs, stubby wings rising out of its back, moving with an entirely alien menace. 

The troll, beside it, was big and nasty looking--to say nothing of the rancid smell, communicated and amplified from the wolves to the men--but it had a basically hominid shape. Besides, they all knew it was only a remote-controlled replica, no matter that it was a military-grade fighting machine. Everyone was fairly certain that they were programmed not to kill Marines on purpose. 

Real trolls had been extinct since at least the twelfth century, wiped out by the alliance of trellwolves and men. But they had never quite bothered to eradicate wyverns, and various curiosity-hunters, naturalists, and biologists over the centuries had bred them back to an approximation of their former glory. Wyverns were huge, and incomparably wild, and they would kill--and, it was generally thought, eat--a wolf or a man if they got the chance.

Wolves and men were smaller and, give or take their armoring and weapons, softer and squishier than either wyverns or trolls. The rational answer--the modern professional military answer--was high-powered firearms if not carpet bombing, but the birthday hunt wasn't about doing anything the modern way, and the men who weren't taking up sniper positions were unslinging their rifles and stacking them in the dirt. They were unsnapping their axe sheathes now, gripping the weapons they used just once a year in hands guided by ten centuries of tradition.

The birthday hunt was about honoring the fact that wolves and men _had_ driven trolls to extinction, and wyverns into obscurity, long before they had firearms at all. They'd done it by hand and tooth and claw, with the strength of the bond--the strength of the pack. 

Nate felt the last moment of hesitation and preparation come to an end. Every man was shifting his weight forward, blade in hand. Every wolf was inching toward its position. For one last second, Bo's authority held the wolves in place, and no man would move without his brother. 

Bo and Nate lunged forward at the same instant, Nate with his hatchet swinging, Bo letting out a howl, and the platoon surged into motion with them. The snipers scampered uphill, the backup fanned out across the best vantage points, and a mass of men and wolves streamed in toward the wyvern and the troll. The pack-sense guided them; they were one creature in forty-four bodies, far outmassing their prey and never getting in their own way. Men and wolves split to take on one or the other without anyone having to issue an order. Nate was one of the first men to reach the wyvern, launching himself at its side while Bo joined Frost and Doom in feinting and darting at it, keeping it snapping at them and leaving its midsection exposed. 

More men were diving in around Nate; he could feel every one of them as clearly as he felt his own hands and feet, felt every blow that landed as clearly as the crunch of his own hatchet through scales. Brad got a glancing blow on the wyvern's hamstring and had to dance quickly out of the way of a back-swiping claw. Lovell's axe struck the troll high, sinking so deep that he had to let go of it and jump back, pulling his knife as soon as he'd hit the ground. Ray sailed in howling as loudly as his sister, swinging fiercely at the hip of the wyvern, hanging on for an instant before it started to coil around him. Frost and Gung Ho were there, biting at the opposite side of the wyvern to make it twist away so that Ray could break free. Manimal was clinging to the troll's back, slashing at it. Fluffy and Princess were darting around the troll's feet, not bothering to try to bite into its impenetrable hide, but keeping it off-balance all the same.

He'd never fought a wyvern before, but the rhythm of it found Nate like it found all of them. He was conscious of being part of the continuity of the pack, down through hundreds of years of experience; at the same time he wasn't thinking about anything but running over to take his place to dart in again, making a slash and rolling clear with a wolf--Frost this time--at his side. They stepped back for a few seconds--Nate was aware of the other dance going on to his side, felt and heard the crack of the troll landing a blow--Christopher reeled backward and two wolves closed on him to tow him back toward the docs--and Lilley rushed up from the reserve, piling on with the rest. 

Meanwhile, three distributed attacks drew the wyvern out nearly straight. When it reared back, Nate was ready with the wolves and men all around him, and they threw themselves at its vulnerable belly. Nate's hatchet rose and fell in perfect alternation with three others and a handful of wolves all biting and clawing until they broke through the scales and skin.

The wyvern let out an awful hiss as blood and ropy guts poured out. Nate kept swinging and the wolves kept biting, tearing the thing open, making sure it would never heal from these wounds. There was a sudden short burst of rifle fire--louder through the wolves' ears than his own--and a hand on Nate's belt, hauling him back. Nate grabbed with his own free hand to catch the scruff of the nearest wolf and drag it with him, and they all got clear just as the wyvern collapsed into a monumental corpse.

The troll had gone down several seconds before, while Nate was immersed in the fight with the wyvern; now a cheer went up from all of them at once for the double kill. Nate was howling as loudly as any of them, shaking his bloodied hatchet in the air. The man behind him--Tony, with a grin and a wink--let go of him as Bo came racing up _over_ the fallen wyvern to knock Dusty aside from Nate and take her own place at his side. That seemed to break a dam, because suddenly there were wolves and men swarming all over the wyvern, yelling and laughing and hacking at it, breaking scales free for souvenirs and presents. Teeth and claws would be a longer, bloodier job, but right now it was all yelling and shoving and hacking and smearing blood all over anyone not sufficiently coated in it. 

Nate didn't see who tackled who first--he was holding himself to the spot where he'd stopped, watching, considering whether to go break a few scales free himself--but the dismembering party on the wyvern turned into men grappling on top of it. Men were also wrestling off to one side, and Nate didn't have to look uphill to know that Rudy and Pappy were still up on the rocks, celebrating that last shot. The pack-sense, wide open between all of them, still keeping them all in sync, tipped from sheer adrenaline high to frenzied _want_ with the suddenness of a storm on the water. Nate instinctively pulled away from it even as he felt himself responding--but it wasn't like heat, mindless and overwhelming as the tide. This was a party, wild and raucous and fun.

Nate took a step back even as Bo veered abruptly away from him--Nate could feel several of the wolves decide at once to leave the men to their foolishness, forming a hunting pack to see what game the wyverns and trolls might not have frightened away. Nate took another step back, looking around. Men were in pairs and trios and little knots, some still playfully fighting, some definitely not, and Nate deliberately didn't take note of who was where doing what. Just bodies, dressed in black, smeared with blood and dust and still bristling with weapons and tools. Just bodies, and all brothers in the pack-sense, all cheerfully crazed with delight at what they'd done, and Nate didn't need to know anything more. 

His gaze caught on another man standing perfectly still by himself. Nate saw Brad's grin--moonlight caught on his white teeth in his blood-and-dirt-caked face--before Brad turned pointedly away, walking the way the wolves had gone. 

Nate hesitated, sweeping another unnecessary glance over the platoon. Pack-sense told him everyone was exulting in whatever they were doing, riding their adrenaline highs and the flood of connection with each other, the out-of-control positive feedback. Then he turned and started skirting around the wyvern in the direction Brad had gone. 

Brad was waiting for him on the far side of some fallen rocks at the base of the hillside--Nate had appreciated their strategic value from the other side a few minutes ago, but they came in handy like this, too. Not that this was really private--nothing was a secret from the pack-sense tonight--but Nate could feel Brad's desire to be a little separate. It echoed his own.

 _Not too separate_. Nate felt Brad tug him closer through the pack-sense, not just encouragement to come over to where Brad was standing, stripping off his bloodied and dirtied gloves. Brad was coaxing him closer in the pack-sense itself, too, encouraging Nate to drop the distance he was keeping between himself and the wildness of the men. 

"Nate," he said out loud, sounding kind of wrecked and hoarse. It was from screaming during the fight, Nate knew, feeling the same rawness in his own throat when he swallowed, but Brad had sounded like that from about the second hour on in the heat-shack--which was also the last time he'd used Nate's first name. 

Nate took a step toward him, raising one hand to his mouth and biting down on the fingertip of his glove to tug it off. With blood in his mouth he let the pack-sense rush back in on him, surging through his body as much as his mind--the fierce, triumphant arousal of the men, the hunting wolves on their race through the desert, Bo and Frost racing side by side up the smooth path of a dry wash. Loudest and brightest and most captivating of all, Brad was blazing in the pack-sense, his blood pounding with reckless lust. Nate felt it all thundering through his own body, his cock going hard in his pants and every sense suddenly more acute. He could feel the embrace of his thigh holster and the straps that held his fighting knife, could feel the friction of every inch of his clothes, and the night air was cold on the back of his neck as fresh sweat broke out.

Nate jerked his glove off and stumbled the rest of the way across the distance to Brad, shoving him into the rock at his back. They crashed against each other, and despite the clothes and gear between them it felt familiar; their bodies remembered each other, and the pack-sense drowned out the differences. Nate closed his ungloved hand on the back of Brad's neck, skin to skin as they ground against each other with their whole bodies. The pack-sense was wide open between them, and Nate could feel how it felt to Brad, on top of how good everything else felt to the guys a few meters away.

Brad tilted his head back, pressing the nape of his neck into Nate's fingers, mouth falling open, and the thought flashed between them that despite all the time they'd spent fucking, there was a lot they'd never done. Unable to deviate too far from mimicking the wolves, they'd been single-mindedly focused on fucking and getting fucked. Brad grinned a little, open-mouthed like a wolf, and Nate was conscious--more in his balls than his brain--of Brad's very sincere regret that he'd never gotten to suck Nate off.

 _Now_ , Nate agreed, stepping back without letting go of Brad. They swung around, hanging on to each other, pack-sense still guiding their feet so they wouldn't stumble. It was inescapably like dancing--exactly like the dirty, bloody, crazed precursor to the ball that this night was--and they were both laughing as Nate slumped back against the rock. He tightened his fingers on the back of Brad's neck as Brad worked on getting Nate's pants open. He wouldn't push them down--on top of the amount of stuff Nate had strapped to them, it would be stupid to get actually undressed--but in short order he had his hand on Nate's cock, and Nate groaned as he added his spike of pleasure to the pack-sense and got it back a dozen times over. 

Nate shifted his grip on Brad, shoving down on his shoulder, and Brad dropped to his knees. Brad didn't hesitate, taking Nate into his mouth in one smooth motion, pressing his shoulder to Nate's thigh to keep him still. Nate slid his bare hand under the edge of Brad's watch cap, scrubbing his fingertips through Brad's short hair as he gasped, overwhelmed by the wet heat of Brad's mouth--fuck, Brad's throat--and the simultaneous knowledge of just how much Brad liked this, how he reveled in deploying another hard-won skill to devastating effect. Nate could feel Brad's arousal, his cock throbbing in his pants, and he was going to do more about that than let Brad suck him off in just--one--minute. 

But first there was this, and Nate let himself be wolfish, lost in the sensation, the rush of pleasure that rebounded through the pack-sense and focused here, on him, his dick in Brad's mouth. Nate was thrusting helplessly while Brad took it, digging his fingers into Nate's thigh and thinking nothing but _Yes, yes, more_ until Nate lost control completely, lost himself in Brad's mouth and the pack. He came as sudden and hard as a hammer blow and the orgasm knocked him a little out of the pack-sense, giving him enough space to open his eyes and see with only his own senses as Brad let Nate's dick slide out of his mouth.

Brad grinned up at him, open-mouthed, licking lips rubbed raw. Nate got both hands into the top of Brad's tac vest and hauled him up, and when the pack-sense rushed back in on him, Nate was already undoing Brad's pants. He remembered--more because it felt better than because he thought it through--to take Brad's cock in his ungloved hand. It was startlingly unfamiliar, and Nate realized--tilting his head down to look while Brad's ragged breathing in his ear took on a hint of a whine--that he'd never actually touched Brad's cock with his hands. Brad had taken care of getting his own condoms on, and by the time he'd been anywhere other than buried in Nate's ass, he'd been thoroughly uninterested in being jerked off. 

He was interested now, twitching little thrusts into Nate's grip. Nate let go for a minute to lick his hand, and Brad groaned in irritation and got his own hand into his pants, only for Nate to knock it aside a second later. He wrapped wet fingers around Brad's cock and jerked him hard and fast, knowing at every stroke how much more Brad wanted, with the exultation of the pack still driving him. This was the last burst of frenzy--a lazy sense of satisfaction was already spreading through the pack under the last spasms of frantic desire. Nate didn't let Brad fall behind, dragging him through it until Brad jerked against him, coming under Nate's fingers, gasping in his ear. 

They stayed still, after, feeling the last of the platoon finish behind them. There was a chorus of taunts about coming in last before the flames finally burned out into satiety. Nate's hand was still in Brad's pants, and Brad was still leaning heavily against him as they both tried to catch their breath. 

Nate flexed his fingers, making Brad hiss a little, but he didn't pull away. Nate made himself let go, wiping his hand on his own boxers before he pulled them up. Brad shifted backward far enough to start putting himself to rights. Nate reached out to Bo reflexively; she was still hunting, and amused as always by the way humans finished so fast.

Brad huffed a laugh and said out loud, "Yeah, well, there's a lot less chafing this way."

Frost and Bo, in perfect synchrony, pushed back a fondly indulgent thought about the terrible fragility of humans.

Nate finished fastening up his pants and said, "I'm starting to feel naked without a rifle."

"Agreed," Brad replied, and led off back toward the platoon. 

There were still a few rifles on the ground where they'd been dropped before the last clash. They found their own and Nate looked around for Mike while Brad trotted over toward the fallen troll, where Ray and Navi were perched on one arm. 

Ray looked up from what looked like a dissection with his fighting knife and yelled, "Brad, tell me you brought that fucking cutter, I think I can get into this casing!"

Nate headed the other way, up onto the wyvern, where Mike was showing Christeson and Stafford how to pry up the scales around the base of the wing without breaking them. Mike smiled as he handed one to Nate, and Nate placed it carefully into his tac vest before he moved a few feet over and started looking for an unbroken scale to pull up himself.

 _So_ , Nate thought, carefully directing it to Mike alone despite the continuing tumult of the pack-sense around them. _Did I just fuck that up?_

Mike snorted out loud, and Nate looked over at him and then, when Mike raised an eyebrow, around at the platoon. None of them had given a shit when Nate and Brad came back together. None of them were paying any special attention to Nate or Brad now. Nate sifted through his awareness of the pack-sense, which was settling down into more normal patterns as the overwhelming unity of the hunt ended. His and Brad's mutual attraction--which had, along with its origin, been common knowledge throughout the platoon anyway--was just about the least interesting thing to have been acted on in the last half-hour. Grudges, crushes, mixtures of both, and yet more complicated issues had burst into life and now were squared away with everything else. The pack-sense was a quiet, steady counterpoint to the cheerful yelling--and weird electrical noises--going on all around him.

 _If that feels like you fucked up,_ Mike opined, _you need to lower your fucking standards._

* * *

Nate drew the short straw and wound up doing the driving when he and a fellow lieutenant carpooled from Twentynine Palms to the hotel in Nevada where the officers ball would be held. Patrick and his brother, Ax, were soon both asleep in the backseat, and Nate drove east into the rising sun with Bo in the passenger seat beside him.

Halfway there, Bo lifted her head, and Nate snapped out of his highway hypnosis and realized she'd been puzzling over something.

 _Fucking Brad isn't rude to Jill_ , Bo concluded, and Nate followed her logic trail through a sense that Brad had priority, since Nate had fucked him months before he even met Jill, and a self-important determination that anything relating to herself--breeding, the hunt--took precedence over any merely human concern of Nate's. 

Nate looked over at her, and Bo's ears pricked as she recognized the sudden roil of tension chasing away Nate's up-all-night grogginess. 

_It's still rude,_ Nate informed her finally, though he couldn't actually dispute any of her points. _I'm going to have to apologize._

Bo didn't understand that. She accepted that it was necessary to make amends for an injury, but she could not grasp what injury Jill had suffered because Nate had sex with Brad on the night of the hunt. There was a general dispensation from the regulations on sexual activity on that night, so it hadn't even been Against The Rules.

 _It's complicated_ , Nate insisted, and Bo promptly lost interest.

* * *

Breakfast was still being served in the hotel when Nate got there, but they'd been fed at dawn, when the hunt concluded, before they were turned loose. Bo was even less interested in food, still smug and sated from having eaten her own kill with her pack the night before. Nate picked up a key from the front desk and had no reason not to go up to see Jill immediately; he forced himself not to hesitate.

Jill was sitting up in bed with the remains of a breakfast tray beside her, still in pajamas. She looked up and smiled when Nate came in, and Nate smiled irresistibly back. His exhaustion didn't leach away her own night's sleep, and his anxiety didn't contaminate her good mood before he'd had a chance to speak. He felt lighter just being near her, just being in the presence of someone with no connection to him--no wolf to hold her to him--who wanted to be with him anyway.

As long as he hadn't fucked it up already.

Nate walked over to the chair nearest the bed and perched on it while Jill looked him over. 

"Definitely a shower before you sleep," Jill agreed, half-correctly reading Nate's avoidance of the bed.

Nate nodded and said, "I want to say, first--"

Jill's eyes went wide and Nate halted, then remembered, again, that she couldn't just pluck his confession out of the pack-sense. Then he hesitated, wondering what she _had_ picked up.

"Nate? Did somebody get hurt? Is everything okay?"

Nate shook his head quickly. "Everyone's fine. We had a few sets of stitches and a few broken ribs, and Ray got a little bit electrocuted, but there was no real harm done. It went really well, actually; we took down a wyvern and a troll. Everyone was excited about it. That's...."

Nate ground to a halt again, searching for the right words to describe it to someone who had never felt anything like it. Jill's eyebrows went up, and the look in her eyes switched from concern to fascination--prurient fascination, Bo's nose promptly informed him, and Nate told her, not for the first time, and not with any great conviction, not to cheat for him like that. 

"Is it actually like the movies?" Jill demanded, half-laughing. 

The look on Nate's face had to be giving him away, now.

"By movies do you mean," Nate said, and cut himself off before he said _porn_. He didn't want to contemplate whether Jill had ever watched wolfthreat porn. 

Jill waved her hand. "The war-romance ones, you know. There's always a hunt or a successful battle or something and then they all go wild for each other."

"Oh," Nate said, recalling a few scenes that he'd always dismissed as romantic fantasy until--well. Until now. He'd never been on a birthday hunt that had gone that well; that was another new experience he could chalk up to recon. 

"Yeah. I'm sorry, I should have--we should have talked about that. All of us had to test clean before we were allowed to go, and it wasn't--we didn't...."

Jill grinned. "Nate, you're a Marine. You're brother to a wolf. We did talk about this--your job takes you away from me sometimes. You have sex with other Marines sometimes. And then you come back, right? Here you are. You came back."

"Yeah," Nate agreed, relief welling up along with a surge of affection--of love, but this probably wasn't the way to say it, and Nate could choose his moment. Jill wouldn't know before he told her. "Yeah. I came back."

"Then come on." Jill stood up and held out a hand, and Nate put his in hers and let her tug him to his feet. "I'll scrub your back and you can tell me where your new bruises came from."

Nate kissed her first, carefully gentle, deliberately chosen. She would never share the memory with him, the fury and triumph of the hunt, nor anything else he'd ever endured for the Corps, what it otherwise meant that he had sex with other Marines sometimes. "I will. All the good parts."

* * *

That night at the ball, when Jill took mercy on him for a while and took a break from dancing, Nate stood and looked around at the spectacle of it. Everyone was in dress uniforms, and the dancers fell half-consciously into perfect patterns, pack-sense automatically tugging the Marines on the floor into coordination with each other. 

Nate reached past them to his own platoon--at this distance just a sense of their existence, a vague warm glow of continued health and safety--and remembered the night before, the way the pack-sense had engulfed them in the thick of the fight. Now it guided the most frivolous of exercises, and it was all the same pack-sense, all the same lesson. They gained more than they lost--more than they could ever describe--from their partnership with the wolves. The wolves would carry them safely through whatever they faced next.

Nate remembered his nightmare about deploying straight from the hunt, and he thought about the way it had actually played out. If the prep had been a dry run for deploying, he could only pray the hunt had been a preview of war. His teams had--as every infantryman was taught--located, closed with, and destroyed the enemy. Bo and the wolves had gloried in their desert skirmish.

 _We're ready_ , Nate acknowledged, glancing over at Bo where she lay in a heap with several other wolves, well-fed and willing to let the humans have their incomprehensible fun. 

For the first time he felt a surge of pure excitement at the prospect of going off to war--with this platoon, this pack, brought to this exact moment of readiness. 

_Let's go_. 

Bo, halfway across the room, stood up eagerly; when Jill found him again Nate was still trying to convince her to lie back down.

* * *


	2. Camp Pendleton, November-December 2002

By the time they got back to Pendleton after the birthday celebrations, scuttlebutt had solidified around the idea that there wouldn't be any foot-mobile recon missions in Iraq. The invasion would roll in at freeway speeds, and that meant they'd all be in Humvees. Nate didn't exactly disbelieve it, but he figured there was no point worrying about what the brass was going to do with recon Marines in an invasion moving too fast to allow recon missions. It would happen when, and if, it happened.

A week and a half after the birthday hunt, the platoon got jolted out of its eager, unified readiness by two arrivals: five Humvees, in which they would roll into Iraq, and one new Lance Corporal. They lost a corporal--Darnold--to Third Platoon at the same time, but at least Bo only griped privately to Nate about it being a poor trade, an E-4 for an E-3. He was a provisional recon E-3 at that, not yet through BRC.

Nate pulled together his TLs for a meeting. ATLs deserved to be present, too, but once you had a third of the platoon meeting about something it was fucking impossible to keep it out of the pack-sense.

Not that that would make much of a difference, in Trombley's case.

"He's just about fucking deaf," Mike said, because someone had to. "He's got almost no pack-sense, and the rest of the wolves don't like Lucky, so they're holding back, which doesn't give Trombley much to hear anyway."

"Is this because he's not Scooter, and Trombley's not Darnold?" Nate asked. "Or is something else going on?"

He didn't ask how Trombley and Lucky had gotten into recon if a recon platoon's wolves wanted nothing to do with them, or who had thought it was a good idea to rush them into a platoon preparing for deployment rather than send them to BRC, where they had an even chance of washing out before anyone had to make any further decisions about them.

Nate looked around at the other men, who all looked similarly grim and uncomfortable. The closeness and strength of pack-sense in recon teams was both legendary and vital; if Trombley and Lucky didn't work with a team, or with the rest of the platoon, they'd put the whole unit in danger by breaking the coordination of the pack-sense. The process of fitting into the pack-sense, making it work, was almost mystical, and almost entirely left to the wolves. There were a thousand ways to describe the pack-sense when it wasn't working quite right, but there weren't any human words that would give humans a way to solve the problem.

Brad shrugged and shifted his weight forward. "We'll take him. Put him on Team One. Frost can keep him in line by force if he has to, and if Navi can't get him plugged into the pack-sense no one can."

Nate nodded, reaching for Mike and finding him doing the same quick calculations Nate was. They couldn't shove Trombley and Lucky into a team whose TL weren't willing to accept them, and Lovell and Pappy were both conspicuously silent after Brad's offer. 

The only other option was to keep Trombley with them, as part of platoon headquarters--whatever that was going to mean, in a line of Humvees--but that would put him at the center of the platoon's pack-sense, cheek by jowl with Bo and Ash. They could keep man and wolf in line, and maybe even drag Trombley into awareness of the pack-sense, but it would put him at the heart of the pack-sense--and whatever it was about him and his wolf that didn't fit with the rest of the platoon, it would be everywhere, not just contained to one team, counterbalanced by the most-trusted and best-liked TL in the platoon.

The math only worked one way. Mike tilted his head and Nate nodded as he spoke. "You get Trombley. But we have to talk about teams more generally, too. Three teams of five plus headquarters don't work in five Humvees. We have to have one double-sized team split across two vehicles. Hopefully that's never going to mean much physical separation, but it's going to mean a big team, in terms of what we usually have, and keeping the pack-sense together between them."

Lovell and Pappy both looked over at Brad, and Brad shifted back this time, folding his arms across his chest. "We can do that. Put Poke in the other vehicle, I'll keep Ray and Trombley. Same argument, sir. Navi and Frost can keep a team of eight or nine together as well as five."

Nate didn't hesitate before agreeing, this time. It had been the only option coming in; Tony was the only ATL in the platoon who had the experience to be potentially cut off with half a recon team to run. Rudy could probably have done it, but Nate wasn't going to split up shieldmates with the invasion possibly only weeks away. 

"Okay," Nate said. "Then all we need to do is decide who's moving to Team One, and we can start figuring out what we're going to do with these Humvees."

* * *

By the first week of December, modifying the Humvees had become the platoon's primary occupation. They'd set up lights at the motor pool so they could work in the early-falling darkness. Brad, Pappy, and Lovell organized the men who had any kind of experience or aptitude for the mechanical and electrical work they were doing, from installing antennas to making sure the wolves would be comfortable in their protective boxes. Nate was leading the unskilled labor pool in painting the Humvees in a camouflage pattern.

Bo was keeping most of the wolves out from underfoot and upwind, where the reek of wet paint would bother them less. The wolves were even more conscious of the vaguely clandestine nature of the men's work than the men were; it was necessarily all over the pack-sense of the platoon. Nate knew nothing about his CO that led him to expect a good result of asking permission--especially when Schwetje would probably kick the question up to battalion, or feel he should but refuse to because of the way it looked. Forgiveness, however, was unlikely to be withheld.

Despite the calculation involved in the decision, the wolves were uneasy, and they kept a constant watch, two or three of them perpetually circling at varying distances from the Bravo Two Humvees. Major Whitmer--Nate's former CO, now attached to First Recon's battalion HQ--barely made it into general vicinity of the motor pool before Ghost and Hurricane were sounding the alarm.

Nate felt the wolves' burst of anxiety transmit itself through the men; in utter silence they all stopped what they were doing and looked around, except for Trombley, who kept on painting for a few seconds and then said, "Guys?"

Garza, next to him, elbowed him and said, "Sh, brass on deck."

Nate locked his own jolt of guilt and anxiety away from the pack-sense, projecting calm to the men. Speaking aloud, for emphasis and for Trombley's sake, Nate said, "Keep on with what you're doing until you're told to give it up, men."

Nate laid his own paint brush down and picked up a rag. He wiped his hands off neatly and then held onto it--a visible admission of his involvement with the work--as he headed over to intercept Whitmer, who was still weaving his way through the motor pool toward Bravo Two. 

Bo joined Nate before he'd gone six steps, head up and ears pricked. Nate couldn't help sharing her feeling of excitement, despite the possible negatives; he and Bo had always liked Whitmer and Astra, and if they were going to shut down the platoon's efforts, at least Nate would know exactly where he stood at the end of it.

As he walked away, Nate felt Brad silently shove Ray back into motion--Ray was mostly in charge of the radio improvements--while Mike called out, "You heard the LT, men, quit gawking."

Before Nate had cleared the last Humvee, the work had resumed. Bo trotted out before Nate to meet Astra, who was leading Whitmer. She bowed readily and cheerfully to Astra. A year ago Astra would have caught her by the scruff like a puppy, or knocked her onto her back. Tonight, Astra licked Bo's face almost without breaking stride, and Nate winced as his optimism about Whitmer's visit evaporated.

Whitmer stopped a few meters away, tilting the folder in his hand to draw Nate's attention to it. Nate's guilt evaporated, too, in favor of a solid lump of dread, which he definitely kept out of the pack-sense, because it was his alone. This had nothing to do with the Humvees. One of Whitmer's duties at HQ was serving as battalion liaison with BreedCom.

Bo had returned to Nate's side, and Nate gave her a push back toward the wolves on the other side of the Humvees, more forceful in the pack-sense than his hand on her shoulder. _Stay and keep watch. It's about breeding soon._

Bo accepted this explanation with her usual impatience; breeding would happen when it happened, and not before. She licked Nate's hand and then trotted off while Nate walked over to where Whitmer stood. As soon as Nate reached him, Whitmer led off into the dark of the countless Humvees not being worked on tonight, Astra leading the way through the dimness. 

They stopped in an open space among the vehicles, and Astra took up watch a couple of meters away from them. Nate folded his arms, suddenly conscious of the chill in the air, now that he was away from his work and men and wolves. He trained his eyes on Whitmer's fatigues, waiting for his eyes to adjust enough to read his name, to distinguish the insignia he knew were there.

"I pulled rank to talk to you, Nate," Whitmer said quietly, and Nate realized as he met Whitmer's eyes that he could feel almost nothing of Whitmer through the pack-sense. It wasn't only that Whitmer was locked down to keep things from him as much as Nate was shielding his own reactions from his men. Even standing here together, their connection in the pack-sense traveled through multiple intermediate steps, up Nate's chain of command and through HQ. 

"I'm going to get away with this once, because I had a BreedCom folder in my hand when I did it, but I can't interfere with Bravo again."

"Understood, sir," Nate said, with a cautious nod, already trying not to feel what that might mean. "I wouldn't expect you to."

Whitmer gave him a penetrating look, and Nate met his eyes steadily and held himself still in the pack-sense. Finally, Whitmer nodded, and took the folder from under his arm, looking down at it as he spoke.

"You said back in Afghanistan that Bo doesn't like strangers."

Nate nodded, a little surprised that Whitmer remembered that observation of Nate's. A lot had happened in the last year. "I think that was why she was willing to accept Frost, sir. She knew he was part of the 15th MEU."

Whitmer nodded but didn't look up from the folder. Nate could almost make out the black print on the blue cover. 

"I've been fighting with BreedCom for a month, trying to get them to commit to assigning her only wolves from Pendleton. That's not quite the same thing, but it would give her some kind of chance of accepting them. But between the rules against the wolves knowingly meeting beforehand, and her rejection and exclusion rate _before_ SERE--they just keep doing the math instead of listening to the logic. They won't assign a wolf to her who they figure is going to have to be transferred afterward to keep them apart, not when they're already shuffling eight other Marines' assignments to keep them clear of her."

Nate nodded. He wouldn't have expected anything else from BreedCom. They were, as a whole, as rear-echelon as it was possible to get; even the POGs in H&S would deploy to the region with them, however far behind the lines they might stay. BreedCom would never leave the air-conditioned comfort of their office building in Quantico; of course they stood on their regs. 

"At SERE, when they pulled the bitches' brothers out to give us the extra lectures," Nate said slowly, carefully not arguing or criticizing or expressing any feelings about anything. "When they described how some bitches get hyper-defensive afterward and won't accept the wolves put to them--it was like they were describing how Bo already had been since the first time. Now that we've been through SERE, I wondered if they wouldn't just write her off completely."

"Not without trying," Whitmer said grimly, and it was the sound of his voice that told Nate he'd understood what Nate was saying, in the absence of any real connection in the pack-sense. "And not while we're gearing up for a desert war." 

Nate could see that. It did make sense from their side. He gritted his teeth and stared into the deeper darkness under the nearest row of Humvees.

"But more than that, Nate, I think they're taking the long view. They're going to try this, this time, and it's probably not going to work. Bo's probably going to reject the breeding, because that's how she is and that's what they're giving you to work with, and BreedCom knows it. They'd like Bo's pups, but they also know you and Bo are going to be around for decades yet. If they don't get her this year or next year, they'll get her eventually. Right now they don't want to deal with working around Bo's requirements, but sooner or later the situation will be right and they will do what they have to do to get the pups they want."

Nate nodded. He'd only thought about his and Bo's future in the Marine Corps in the vaguest terms; Bo actively coveted the positions of Captain Patterson and his sister Athena, in command of Alpha Company, and Nate felt confident they could rise to a company command position if they held on and acquitted themselves well in their second combat deployment. 

It would mean more patience than Bo could hold in her head at once, but patience was Nate’s job in their partnership. He would keep her steady while they rotated through desk work of one kind or another, and Bo would keep drawing the attention of the brass their way. It was no accident that General Mattis was a bitch's brother; Ferrando had been a bitch's brother, too, for the first fifteen years of his career, before his sister was killed in a training accident. She lingered in the pack-sense around him, a ghost trailing after his new brother. Rare as they were, officer-bitches tended to go far when they didn't wash out spectacularly. Nate had no intention of him and Bo being one of _those_. 

"In the meantime, this is the best I could do for you," Whitmer said, turning the folder toward Nate. "Solo breeding, and they're allowing you the dossier on their first choice."

Nate's eyes went wide as he reached out to take the folder and flipped it open, his eyes going straight to the sealed plastic packets clipped to the top. Those were scent samples--the only descriptions of the wolf in question that could actually allow Bo to recognize him when he came through the door of the heat-shack. 

There was a paper dossier, as well, a handful of lines of text and two photos, and Nate's eyes had adjusted enough now that he could make out black-on-white with ease. The man and wolf looked generically familiar; what caught Nate's eye was written next to _Currently assigned_. 

Nate looked up at Whitmer and caught him smiling slightly. 

"The _Peleliu_ ," Nate said. "Was he...."

Whitmer nodded. "Two years now. They were on the ship when you and Bo were there. I don't know whether you'd have met them, but there's a decent chance Bo will recognize his scent even without that to remind her."

For the first time since that SERE classroom six months before, Nate felt a faint hope that Bo's next heat might not be a complete disaster.

Whitmer gave him a deflating look. "It might not be this wolf, Nate. There are always alternates, and shit happens all the time. BreedCom's first choice is just a first choice, and if they have to work out alternatives in a hurry when the time comes, they won't consult me again. I've already made all the arguments I'm in a position to make. Don't go promising Bo that she's getting this wolf."

"No, sir, I know," Nate promised, shutting the folder with a plastic crackle. "It's just--it's a good solution, sir. Thank you."

Whitmer nodded. "Command doesn't exist _entirely_ to make your life more difficult, Lieutenant."

Nate smiled. "No, sir."

Whitmer gave him a look that would have been a cuff, if they were wolves, and turned back the way they'd come. Nate fell into step beside him as Astra trotted on ahead. 

"Preventive maintenance on the Humvees, is it?" Whitmer inquired, not looking at Nate as they walked.

"Yes, sir," Nate said, because he knew his line.

"Taking good care of the equipment you've been issued," Whitmer pronounced, just as Bo came trotting up to meet them; she'd picked up Nate's optimism and amplified it to pure wolfish assurance, and Nate tightened his hand on the folder. This could work. They could be all right. 

Whitmer squeezed Nate's shoulder. "Keep up the good work, Lieutenant."

* * *

For the next few weeks, the platoon spent every spare hour working on the Humvees. Nate barely got home to do more than sleep and change from one uniform to another; he and Jill communicated mostly in voice mail and emails, and he remembered again and again that moment of readiness at the ball, and felt as if their deployment were happening in slow motion. They were already on their way, moving toward war and away from their Oceanside lives by small degrees. Soon it would take them away entirely, but first there was this trial separation. 

Maybe it was yet another dry run; the men certainly took their work on the Humvees as seriously as they had the hunt or any training mission. For the less technical work, the men tended to divide up into teams, all working on--and bonding with--the vehicles they'd be in after deployment. Nate already felt a proprietary attachment to the shotgun seat of the command Humvee. 

The teams were learning their way around each other, Team One Alpha--Brad, Ray, Trombley, and Garza--as much as any. Ray had a stronger tendency to talk out loud than anyone else in the platoon anyway, but with Trombley around Brad and Garza did it too, and Team One Bravo, always nearby, would often join in. They were arriving at an equilibrium. They were making it work.

Still, a week before Christmas, Nate found himself sitting alone with Mike over a stack of paperwork, venting a long stream of disaster scenarios Trombley and Lucky might cause. "And how the fuck are they going to hear orders during a firefight, or a sandstorm? I mean, sure, all orders are supposed to go out verbally as well, but that's just not _enough_ half the time."

Mike nodded slowly when Nate ground to a halt, and Nate realized that he'd just been ranting for several minutes without stopping.

"Nate," Mike said. "Not that I don't agree with every word you just said, but I think you and Bo probably better head down to the heat-shack now."

Nate barely choked back a furious denial--he wasn't worrying about this because of Bo's body chemistry, it was a _legitimate concern_. Bo snarled openly at Ash, who rolled pre-emptively onto her side, and Nate gave up all at once. 

"Yeah," Nate sighed. "You and Ash should clear out."

Mike nodded without a word, and Bo backed off enough to let Ash slink away, Mike on her heels. Nate went to his desk and pulled a folder from the drawer, finally tugging the scent packets free. 

"Hey, Bo," Nate said softly, and Bo turned to look at him. He could feel the tension in her, the awareness of what was to come. 

Nate tore open the packet, waving it toward her, and said, "You remember this wolf?"

He couldn't smell anything through his own senses, but he caught the scent through Bo's nose. After a strong surge of _male wolf_ Bo registered, just as strongly, _yes_ , and then delivered Nate the memory. She had woken up, at some point in the long drowsy day she and Nate had spent lying together in a bunk under observation, after her breeding with Frost on the _Peleliu_. That wolf-- _cedar under snow_ , Rocket--had been lying on the opposite bunk, keeping watch on them while his brother was momentarily out of sight. She'd shared no direct link in the pack-sense with Rocket, but he had been attentive and calm and steady.

 _Maybe him,_ Nate suggested. _Or one of his shipmates._

Bo treated Nate to a rapid sensory rehearsal of the smell of every Navy wolf they'd crossed paths with on the _Peleliu_ and the _Dubuque_. She had misgivings about a couple of them--desert wolves like herself, with a too-closely-related smell about them--but on the whole she seemed amenable, and it added a reassuringly wide variety of wolves to her roster of non-strangers. 

_Maybe now_ , Bo suggested pointedly, and came over to Nate to close her teeth, with perfectly judged pressure, on his right hand. Nate still had a scattering of small scars from Bo doing the same less expertly as a puppy, on the day she chose him. He smiled and let Bo tug him into motion. 

They made it about ten feet outside before Ray came walking up, wolfless. He exchanged a lazy salute for Nate's harried one, once Nate got his hand back from Bo.

"Ray," Nate said, not stopping, and Ray fell in beside him. "How's your sister?"

"Fat and cranky," Ray said. "My mom's coming out here for Christmas so I don't have to try to get Navi on a plane like this."

Nate tried not to think about the much longer plane ride all the wolves might have to cope with soon, or what kind of state Navi and Bo would be in when the time came. Ray sent an apologetic wince through the pack-sense. 

"I just wanted to ask you, sir," Ray said. "You're going to be pretty busy for a couple of days, and I've been thinking about another modification we could do on the Humvees. See, they keep talking about all these nukes and shit that are supposed to be over there somewhere."

Nate hid his own wince, shushing Ray through the pack-sense. "Ray, you know there are things we can't defend against. Even adding conventional shielding to the Humvees would be impractical. If there's some kind of nuclear attack--that's a contingency we can't prepare for, not at our level."

"Yes, sir," Ray said, undaunted. "But the point is, what if we find some of the WMDs? Because if we could get our hands on some plutonium, we could use it to run flux capacitors, but that's not going to do us any good if we haven't already got the flux capacitors wired up."

Nate walked on for a couple of steps, running that over in his mind, before he actually looked over at Ray. 

"Corporal," Nate said, "the basic problem I see here is that the top speed of a Humvee, even unloaded and without all the extra weight we've added in modifications, is well below 88 miles per hour. You're just never going to get it up to speed."

"You leave that to us, sir," Ray said cheerfully. "But if you're with us on the basic principles we can start working on flux capacitors. I mean, you don't want just one of those in the whole platoon. One team going back alone to Vietnam or some shit is going to be in a world of hurt. Although, I mean, I guess the fewer guys there are the better the odds that we can avoid making out with our own moms. Or each other's moms. Or your mom, sir."

"Even at sixteen my mother was too smart for you, Corporal," Nate pointed out confidently. 

"But, yes, obviously the modification should be platoon-wide if we're going to try it at all," Nate went on, catching his first sight of the small, square buildings that housed Camp Margarita's heat-shacks. "I don't want anyone experimenting with time travel in my absence. You can gather the basic materials and start assembly, but I don't want to come back out of the heat-shack and hear you've been chasing lightning strikes in the name of testing."

"No, sir," Ray agreed. "All purely a hypothetical precaution until we find some nukes lying around in the desert."

Bo dashed the last ten meters and then paced impatiently outside the entry door to the heat-shack building. Nate stopped and looked Ray in the eye, and Ray gave him a look of total understanding and brother-of-bitch camaraderie. Nate recognized, not for the first time, that he and Ray had joined the Marines at the same time, Ray straight out of high school, Nate out of college. Bo and Navi were within a couple of months of the same age; as far as the wolves were concerned that made Nate and Ray the same age, too. 

Ray raised his hand carefully this time, in a crisp and perfect salute, and Nate abruptly felt the whole pack-sense of the platoon behind Ray, echoing that same considered respect--and under it, the same care that had driven Ray to escort him the last forty meters. Nate returned the salute with equal deliberation, and said, "Two days, Corporal. I want to see serious progress when I get back."

Ray grinned. "No problem, LT. Brad's been doing sketches for days."

Nate shook his head and turned away to join Bo. 

The smell of the heat-shack entrance area brought back a sudden, overwhelming memory of Bo's first heat; they hadn't come here, to this exact building, but to a functionally identical one a mile or so away, in the 1/1's territory at Pendleton. That time, Bo had been barely out of puppyhood, Nate had been a cherry second lieutenant. It had been peacetime, the Marine Corps had still been one big adventure, and they had been sure that breeding was one more exciting thing to accomplish.

Bo looked up at Nate, feeling as much older as Nate did. For the first time, Nate felt Bo reflecting back his own uncertainty about breeding. Last time had worked--last time had brought them Frost and Brad--but this time anything could happen, and nothing good had come of the wolves BreedCom had offered them so far. Nate fell back on reminding her that it could be a _Peleliu_ wolf, but Bo just echoed his own uncertainty back to him, and trotted up to the corpsman waiting to receive them. 

There was a whole intake process that they'd missed last time by virtue of doing a field breeding. The familiar Marine Corps red tape had all felt logical and necessary when they did this before Bo's failed first breeding; at the time, having no idea what would transpire inside, Nate had welcomed the methodical transition into the heat-shack. Now Nate was vibrating with impatience by the end of all the rote questions and answers, and Bo was pacing all over the available space, restraining her urge to pick a fight with _someone_. There wasn't another wolf in sight or smell, for exactly this reason.

Nate undressed when he was told to, automatically checking his pockets as he did; only then did he remember that of course he didn't have his phone in his uniform pocket, and that there was a call he should make. 

"Could I use the phone?" Nate asked, nodding toward the one on the wall of the exam room. "Off-base call."

The corpsman gave an understanding nod, and waved Nate toward it. 

It was the middle of the day, and Nate was unsurprised but relieved when he got Jill's voicemail. "Hey, it's Nate. Bo's going into heat, so I'm going to be stuck on base for a few days. I don't--" Nate found he couldn't say _I don't know how this is going to go_ in front of the calm, professional corpsman. He couldn't admit that uncertainty, though presumably here at Camp Margarita they were used to bitches who'd been through SERE and had the rejection rates to prove it. 

"Don't pick up the phone the first time I call," Nate said. "I'll leave you a message and tell you how it went, and then I'll be in touch after that. I love you."

Bo trotted up to him, nudging insistently at his bare knee. Nate put his hand on her head and added, "Bo says hi, and take care of yourself while we're away."

Not that the next two days would be particularly distinguishable from the two before, from Jill's perspective, unless she was worried about Nate and Bo. He wanted to say _don't worry_ and hung up instead. He knew it wouldn't reassure her. 

With that last loose end tied up, Nate went and perched on the exam table. He got his blood drawn and nails inspected--and was sent to scrub with a nail brush until he had all the grease and paint off his fingers--and his vitals checked, and then knelt and held Bo's head while she got checked out. They were both cleared fit for breeding, and then there was nothing left but to go into the heat-shack proper. When the door sealed behind them they were absolutely alone, and there was no way out of this but through.

* * *

Bo paced. Nate worked out. When he couldn't make himself wait anymore, he washed up and then prepped, and all the time the not-quite-yet anticipation was crawling over his skin like a thousand ants, making him edgy and impatient. Wandering around the heat-shack with his ass lubed and Bo still not all the way there somehow epitomized everything about the last several weeks. Painting Humvees--fitting them out with better radios and cammie netting for some war that would just fizzle out before it happened, or boil down to a few days of bombing and nothing at all for recon to do. They might as well be spending all their time building fucking flux capacitors into the Humvees--it was all just a way to kill time, because it was never going to work. All they would really do was wait, and wait, and wait some more, and--

Nate leaned with his forehead against the wall, hands pressed flat to either side of his shoulders. As if he could push right through it and find his platoon. As if he could escape this. As if they could go and find--but no. There was no good option. There were just a few survivable options, and an entire Corps full of bad ones. 

Bo came over and reared up against the wall beside him, scrabbling to get purchase on the smooth surface of the wall. Nate slid a hand over, extending his arm, and Bo shifted to brace her paws on his arm and shoulder, and then leaned against him, a column of warmth. Nate turned his head without opening his eyes, and Bo licked his face. 

"I know," Nate said softly. "I know. I've always got you."

Bo closed her teeth briefly, delicately, on his jaw, and then she sprang away all in one twisting motion. Nate opened his eyes to watch her go, and slumped against the wall in the next second as her heat came on all at once. He took a couple of deep breaths and then called it out as Bo's pacing picked up speed. "Observer, we are Alpha Hotel."

"Copy that," said the voice from the ceiling. "Stand by."

Nate snarled in frustration-- _stand by_ , like he'd been doing anything else for _hours_. He went to kneel by the bottle of lube he'd left in the middle of the floor, filling the cup of his palm and coating his fingers. Positioning himself a couple of meters from the door--facing it, because he had to see as soon as there was anything to see--he spread his knees apart on the floor until his thighs burned with the stretch. 

His dick was hard, throbbing with the racing of his heart, and his already-slicked ass felt gapingly empty. Nate shoved three fingers in at once, knowing that it wouldn't help. It felt good--not like sex but like breathing, like taking a piss when you thought your bladder was going to explode. Not so much pleasure as relief, and not nearly enough of that. 

He kept it up anyway, twisting his fingers in his ass, staring fiercely at the door while Bo paced behind him. He had to be ready for all contingencies, had to hold both in his mind at once--breeding and disaster--while his sister was flooding him with the single reality of her body, this overwhelmingly present _now_ which was nothing but wanting. But even Bo, wolf that she was, wasn't entirely ignoring Nate's wariness. 

Nate wanted to close his eyes. His whole body shook with the sensations from his ass, his breath was coming short, and if he didn't stop soon he was going to come all by himself, entirely alone. 

He didn't stop. Not until the voice from the ceiling spoke again. "This is your five minute warning. Repeat, five mikes to contact."

"Roger that," Nate made himself say out loud, and started counting down in his head, slowing the motion of his fingers, shoving them deep and drawing them back out deliberately. With fifty-five seconds to go he pulled them free and rested his hands beside his knees. He got his toes down and rocked his weight back onto his feet from his knees. 

Bo squared up at his three o'clock, watching the door, but Nate had taken the position directly in front of it. Bo was at an angle. Nate had the shortest line on whoever was coming in. Maybe that wouldn't matter; maybe when the wolf came in Bo would raise her tail and welcome him. Maybe he would be--

The door opened, and Nate knew before the wolf cleared the threshold; Bo took a breath and it went straight to Nate, not _male wolf_ but a pure revulsion that went far beyond _no_ and straight into murder.

Nate had been through SERE with Bo, and they had both learned as much as the Marine Corps could teach them about what a bitch and her brother could expect to suffer when captured. He knew that she wasn't going to accept coercion. He knew that she wasn't going to hesitate. He knew that there was exactly one thing he could do to prevent her from killing that wolf on the first leap, and it was to leap faster.

Even as the wolf caught the scent of Bo's heat and hurled himself over the threshold, Nate sprang forward. Bo was a fraction of a second behind him, but Nate had correctly judged the angle, the speed, and his own readiness. The male wolf struck Nate's chest head-on, as Bo--pulling up, even now mostly unwilling to hurt Nate--crashed awkwardly against his back. Nate heard yelling from the doorway; the wolf's brother hadn't even made it inside. Nate spread his arms, trying to block Bo from going around him. He'd had the wind knocked out of him and couldn't breathe, but that mattered less than stopping Bo from doing anything they'd punish her for.

Bo's teeth closed on his upper arm, dragging him backward as the male wolf tried to push past him. Nate heard the hiss and thump of the tranquilizer darts more through Bo's ears than his own. He felt the sharp sting as if in his own flank. Bo's grip on him suddenly loosened and she staggered sideways. The male wolf stopped, turning his head and snapping his teeth at his own dart. Bo growled out her fury at Nate's betrayal as her long legs folded under her.

Nate twisted around, struggling to keep his balance; he felt drunk from the tranquilizer flooding Bo's system, and his emptied lungs ached. He finally gasped a breath as Bo stared balefully up at him from the floor. He didn't try to touch her, didn't even think an apology. He just watched as she went under, his breath coming in frantic heaves as hers evened out into unconsciousness.

With Bo's awareness dimmed into sleep, Nate's sense of her receded to the physical. She was still in heat--Nate was still aroused, still wanting--but without Bo awake and obsessively focused on satisfying that heat, they were only physical sensations. Nate stayed where he was, staring down at her, until the words the male wolf's brother was saying--snarling--came abruptly clear in his ears.

"Fucking psycho SERE bitch, they both fucking attacked at once," Nate turned toward him as the man went on, "my brother didn't do that, that fucking bitch bit her own _brother_ trying to get at him, she should be put fucking down--"

Nate leaped again, this time ready to kill. How dare anybody fucking threaten his sister, he would choke the breath out of him before he could speak another word, he would--

Nate came up short in the grip of too many hands. There were a half-dozen bodies between him and the male wolf's brother, but that brotherfucker had a death wish, because he was still screaming. 

"Every pup she's ever thrown should be fucking--" and then his breath went out in a _whoof_ as somebody other than Nate hit him, but that wasn't enough. It wasn't going to be enough until Nate had his _blood_ , all of it, because he'd threatened Bo, threatened the _pups_ , and Nate was going to kill him if it was the last thing he ever fucking did. 

The hands on Nate lifted him off his feet as he struggled, and then his thigh exploded in pain, agony swamping his entire body. He hit the ground on his back before the pain had even begun to subside, knocking his breath out again. He watched a multi-limbed irregular blur flow past above him, and by the time he'd blinked his eyes clear, there were only the corpsmen left. There were three of them kneeling over him.

There shouldn't be that many when Nate wasn't even fighting anymore. Nate closed one eye--still three--at the same time he tried to reach through his sister's senses to verify. But Bo was unconscious, her senses dimmed; Nate reached toward her--squirming his right hand, which no one was holding on to, past the knees of a corpsman. He managed to get his hand onto one of her legs, and the warmth of her was a reassurance, even as he became conscious of his own body as a set of separate, identifiable sensations.

Pain was still on top at the moment. Nate looked down at his own body--three corpsmen, three was too many--and found himself smeared with blood. Blue-gloved hands--the right coated entirely in red--were holding a pressure bandage against his right thigh, where the overwhelming pain had come from to stop him fighting. He'd been cut up there, Nate realized, looking at the red covering his skin down to his knee, splashed across his left leg and smeared up over his cock--it was going cool on his skin, feeling weirdly like lube--and up his belly. The male wolf must have clawed Nate when they collided, and just like someone had punched the male's wolf's brother to shut him up, the corpsman had punched Nate in that wound to make him stop fighting. 

There were more blue-gloved hands coming down between, obscuring his view as they prodded at his chest. 

"Deep breath, LT," someone said, and Nate tried to obey, though his breath was still coming in quick, shallow pants. The hands worked in a circle around his sternum, checking his ribs. It hurt like a forming bruise--even as Nate watched he could see it mottling red and purple--but there was no agony of broken bone, and his breathing wasn't restricted.

The hands kept touching him, though, applying patient, firm pressure that Nate couldn't quite resist pushing up into. He was still hard, his balls aching, his ass slickly waiting, and these hands--and the hands on his thigh--and the hands on his arm--

Nate looked over and found more hands holding down another pressure bandage, this one on his upper arm. His arm was blood-smeared down to his wrist.

"She didn't bite me," Nate insisted, remembering the wolfbrother's accusation. "She was just moving me."

"I know," said one of the corpsmen above him. "We saw the whole thing, LT. It's fine. You and your sister both did the right thing."

Nate looked over at her again and realized that there was a fourth corpsman in the heat-shack, this one kneeling beside Bo and pressing a stethoscope to her chest. 

"Hey!" Nate said sharply. "What are you doing?"

"Just monitoring her breathing and heartbeat, LT," said the fourth corpsman, without looking up. "You could probably do it better for us. Can you feel her breathing?"

Nate let his eyes fall nearly closed and focused on the feeling of Bo through the bond. Most of what he felt was the purely animal sense of her that he associated with her being asleep: a warm body, a warm still place in his mind. But when he focused he could still find her sensations--his own body was the proof that she was still in heat and transmitting it to him. He could feel her steady, measured breaths. 

"Yeah," Nate said slowly. "I feel her. She's okay."

"Good," the corpsman said, sounding far away. "Just stay right with her. We need you to yell at the top of your lungs if you feel her getting in any trouble, all right? If she can't breathe, you gotta yell out for her."

"She's okay," Nate repeated, and his own voice sounded just as far away; he could feel the slow expansion and contraction of Bo's lungs, the way the left strained a little harder because she was lying on that side. He could even smell what she smelled on each breath, though it was an incoherent jumble of scents, Nate's own blood foremost among them, and then assorted men and wolves and the smells of the heat-shack and of first aid supplies. Something strangely rock-and-dust-smelling was abruptly mingled with the scent of Nate's blood, and Nate opened his own eyes and looked, watching a corpsman shake black powder onto the red gashes down his thigh. 

"What," Nate said dizzily, because he was pretty sure corpsmen always insisted on making wounds cleaner, not dirtier. But this one laid another pressure bandage down over the dust, mashing it into Nate's wound. 

"It's called QuickClot," said one of the voices above him. "It forms a big artificial scab for you. We can't do stitches in the heat-shack, so we need a little help to stop your bleeding."

"Oh," Nate said, because that made sense. He turned to watch more powder be sprinkled onto the arc of punctures on his left arm and then felt a confusing hard pressure on his right arm, the one extended toward Bo. Nate turned his head the other way and realized one of the corpsmen was putting a blood pressure cuff on his arm, which was sort of bizarre and hilarious. 

"Probably kind of high right now," Nate offered. 

"Should be up twenty, thirty points from baseline when your sister's in heat," the corpsman agreed. "You keep your hand right on her for me, keep feeling how she's breathing, okay?"

Nate nodded, skritching through the fur on Bo's leg with his fingertips, letting his own lungs go in and out with hers. Neither of them were having any trouble breathing. 

"We just need to figure out how much blood you've lost," the corpsman went on. "If your pressure's down too far, that means you don't have enough blood going around, right? We might need to get you topped back up."

"Sure," Nate said, and his hips jerked up at a light, wet touch on his thigh. He looked down and realized the corpsman there had tied down the pressure bandage and was starting to clean him up, wiping away blood from his left leg with a baby wipe. There was something weird about that, but Nate couldn't think of what it was, too busy being unbearably aroused by the touch on his skin, cool and clinical as it was. Another corpsman took his left hand and started cleaning up Nate's left arm, and Nate's hand tightened on Bo, his back arching without volition.

None of the corpsmen seemed to notice, and none responded. Nate twisted his head so he could press his face against the floor, hiding the best he could as he writhed under their hands, being cleaned up. Moving made it hurt worse, but he couldn't help himself. One of them was going to touch his cock sooner or later, cleaning him off, and he might come, and that would be annoying because he had to--

"What the fuck," Nate said abruptly as the situation snapped into focus. "If I need stitches why am I still in the fucking heat-shack?"

"Ohh, there's your blood pressure," said the corpsman over him, and Nate was acutely conscious that he was more or less immobilized by their ministrations and couldn't punch _anyone_. And his sister, who would gladly have helped, was still knocked out.

"Is this still fucking happening?" Nate demanded, and when he tried to sit up they helped him instead of holding him down. His head went light for a few seconds--Bo's breathing suddenly ballooned in his consciousness, the only thing he could feel, pain and wanting all cut off into static. 

When he got his own body back, the corpsman on the blood pressure cuff was holding a bottle of Gatorade to his lips, and Nate scowled and drank, managing not to choke as the ones cleaning him up continued. After the Gatorade he got bitch pudding--chocolate peanut butter, not one of the awful experimental flavors. Nate accepted it, sucking it down even though it tasted weird right after the artificial citrus of the Gatorade. 

He flung the empty packet at the corpsman, who accepted it without changing expression and offered Nate another Gatorade. 

"So that's it," Nate said. "You have to get me functional because this isn't enough to scrub the breeding."

"No bones broken," the corpsman agreed. "Your blood pressure didn't drop below normal even before you got mad, and now it's right up to the target range. We've closed your wounds. Now, LT, if you don't agree with our assessment and you want to halt the breeding on the grounds of the injuries you've sustained...."

"Who the fuck are you asking to risk his wolf coming into this heat-shack right now?" Nate demanded, though he knew that the corpsmen had even less control over any of this than Nate did. He looked up toward the unseen camera, the unseen observer, toward BreedCom and his chain of command. 

"The next one is going to get _fucking killed_ because I'm not going to fool Bo twice. That's what you get if you send another wolf in right now. You don't get pups, you just get a dead wolf. Maybe two dead wolves," Nate added, and then stopped short at that horrific thought-- _Bo_ could get hurt. Sooner or later she was bound to run up against a male wolf who could take her, who caught on fast enough to what she was doing to fight back at full strength. 

"You're not responsible to guarantee outcomes, LT," the corpsman pointed out, gesturing with the Gatorade Nate still hadn't taken from him. "You're only responsible for following the lawful orders you've been given. If you're going to insist on halting the breeding, I'm going to need you to say exactly that before we can proceed. But it's not on you. And the male wolves' brothers are always warned when they're being put to a SERE bitch. They know to be on guard. If you really think a wolf is going to be killed, you have to use your own judgment to make that call."

Nate squeezed his eyes shut, reaching for Bo and getting nothing but her breathing and the scents her breath carried; he could smell his own anger, and he could smell how much of it was built of pain and fear and unsatisfied heat. If he really thought a wolf would be killed--but he didn't, in the end. 

He thought there would be a lot more waiting around, and he thought there would be a lot of Bo being furious with him and everyone; he thought Bo or the other wolf would get hurt, but he also thought that the watch team would have their fingers on the triggers of the tranquilizer guns. He thought that he himself would get hurt again, spill more blood and take more bruises, but he couldn't defy an order on such squeamish grounds. 

He had an obligation to obey orders even if he _did_ think he and Bo could be killed, when it was in pursuit of a mission outside the heat-shack. Inside keeping Bo alive was the whole point, but....

Nate muttered, "Fuck," and took the Gatorade. By the time he'd finished that there were no more hands on him, though his dick was still blood-smeared. The corpsman who'd started at Nate's thigh held up more baby wipes with a questioning look as Nate handed back the empty Gatorade bottle, and Nate considered his options and then shook his head. 

"You do it," Nate said. "Please." 

Nate couldn't not watch--he didn't dare be surprised by the sensations. He raised his left hand to his mouth, setting off a reassuring bolt of pain from his bandaged arm, and closed his teeth on a knuckle as the baby wipes came into contact with his dick. He concentrated on breathing through his nose and tracking Bo's breathing and not coming, not coming, not coming. The corpsman's touch was fast, never closing around his dick, and the wet touch was a cruel tease, no more. 

Nate mostly managed to choke back his frustrated whine when the corpsman finished, leaving him damply clean and smelling faintly sweet and antiseptic. He hadn't come, and he was still just as hard as he was going to be for fuck knew how long. 

"How's she breathing, LT?" the corpsman kneeling by Bo asked. 

Nate took a deep breath, feeling the limits of his own lungs and the limits of hers, and he nodded. "She's okay."

The corpsman at Nate's right unfastened the blood pressure cuff while the one at Nate's left wrapped an extra layer of bandage and tape around his upper arm. "You're going to need to stand up, now. That's part of the fitness rubric."

"Sure," Nate said. Clearly this was just the way it was going to go. "We can't let the fitness rubric down."

The corpsmen all backed away from him--the third one, who'd bandaged Nate's leg, disappeared through the exit door--and Nate worked his way around to all fours, then pushed up onto his knees before he got one foot under him and then the other. Two legs felt all wrong--not just because he was still kind of wobbly, or because he could feel every shredded inch of his right thigh protesting his weight. He was in the heat-shack, and Bo was in heat, and his whole body wanted to curve down in imitation of her. Still, he managed to get upright, and stood there long enough to satisfy the corpsmen. The one who'd bandaged Nate's arm moved in with the baby wipes again, to clean up whatever they'd missed before. 

Nate gritted his teeth through it and kept his eyes on Bo, lying unnaturally still on the floor. "You going to wake her up soon?"

The corpsmen all looked at each other, and Nate almost wanted to laugh. "Right. Of course. You don't want to be in here when she's awake. Much better to let her be pissed off with _me_."

"The antagonist is very fast-acting," the corpsman kneeling by Bo explained. "We'll jab her and get clear. Unless you think you're in danger from her, if she's angry at you."

Nate scoffed even as he put his hand to his bandaged arm. "I told you, she didn't bite me. She's not going to hurt me. She's just going to be really, really fucking angry."

The corpsmen all nodded, and when Nate was all clean they made him walk away from the area where he'd fallen, and Nate realized there was still blood on the floor. While that got cleaned up, the lead corpsman harassed Nate into walking, stretching, raising both arms above his head, and generally demonstrating his ability to function through his injuries, or maybe just checking the security of the bandages. The other corpsman came and wrapped his thigh in an ace bandage, securing it with safety pins, and by then the heat-shack stank of the bleach they'd scrubbed the floor with, and air was roaring through the vents, trying to clear the smell. 

"Okay," the lead corpsman said as the second one left, leaving only him and the one who still knelt by Bo. "LT, unless there's any other medical attention you need, we're going to wake your sister up and get back with the program."

"They won't--" Nate said, cutting himself off as a new worst case scenario bloomed in his mind's eye. "They're not going to send another wolf in here right away, are they? Before she's really awake?"

Nate felt sick at the thought--sick and furious, ready again to kill someone to defend her.

"No," the corpsman said quickly. "And also hell no, LT. She's got a fitness rubric of her own, and the antagonist will have her good to go within a minute or so. Nobody comes through the door until we're sure she's ready, and sign-off from you is on the checklist. Until you tell us she's fully alert and ready, we don't give her a go."

Nate nodded, but the fear and fury didn't really go away, only subsided into his gut. There wasn't any good way for it to turn out. If they had a wolf she would accept, they'd have tried him first. 

The corpsman next to Bo pulled a syringe out, and within a few seconds he'd found the vein he wanted and was pushing the plunger down. As soon as he'd pulled the needle free he was on his feet and headed for the door--and even as it closed, Nate could feel Bo's consciousness returning, a groggy mental grumbling coming through the bond as her legs twitched and tail thumped. Nate stayed where he was, a few feet away, watching as Bo lifted her head. He felt her scent the heat-shack, felt her working to parse the dissipating smells, all of which centered on Nate himself. There was still too much blood-smell. 

There was also the fact that Bo was in heat, and even half-awake the intensity of her focus on that made Nate shake with want.

Bo got to her feet--staggering, wriggling all over as she tested out her body--and Nate gave in and folded down to his knees. Bo shook all over again, more alert with every passing second, piecing together what had just happened out of her own mind and Nate's. She growled quietly, picking up where she'd left off, and took a few hesitant steps toward Nate before suddenly bounding toward him as she gained full control of herself.

Her anger eclipsed even her heat for a moment, and it wasn't directed at the vanquished wolf--he was gone, and in the end that was all Bo had wanted to accomplish. She wouldn't fret over not killing him now any more than she'd paused to fret over the consequences of her actions when she launched herself at him. Now she was angry at Nate as she would be at anyone who harmed her brother. The smell of Nate's blood was everywhere, and Nate himself was to blame.

Bo licked roughly over his face and throat, and then nosed quickly but delicately over the bandages on his arm and thigh. Her anger was roiling, wordless, and Nate submitted himself to it. There was no other way to reconcile himself to her but to let her have her way in this. When she'd satisfied herself that he was sufficiently bandaged, she shifted to licking at his rising bruises--not only the impact of a wolf's skull on his chest, but the darkening marks on his arms and one hip where he'd been restrained and fought hard enough to hurt himself against their grips.

Bo's anger was settling down into something Nate could identify in words-- _careless, reckless, foolish, childish_ \--but after a few more battering licks and nudges, Bo backed away from him and trotted over to the entrance door. Nate heaved a sigh and stood up again, following her across the heat-shack. Bo wasn't going to let him win on positioning again, but he wasn't going to let her out of his reach, either.

From overhead came the voice of the lead corpsman, sounding more expressive than the usual neutral observer's voice and faintly amused. "Would you say she's alert and ready, LT?"

There was no denying it, and not much point putting it off any further. "Alert and ready, affirmative."

The observer's voice came back almost immediately. "This is your five minute warning."

Nate nodded, dropping to his knees at Bo's flank and slinging an arm over her hindquarters. She squirmed under his hold, trying to dance away from him, and Nate leaned into her and tightened his grip as he counted down mentally and stared at the door. 

He should be prepping right now. He could feel the last slick remnants of the lube from before, but he was drawn tight as a drum in every muscle, as closed up and braced against invasion as he could be even as he wanted desperately. He wasn't going to get what he wanted--Bo wasn't going to get what she wanted--and all he could do was try to minimize the damage. He couldn't take any time or attention away from that. He couldn't go six feet away and get the bottle of lube from where it had landed after the previous scuffle, and he couldn't spare his hands for himself even if he had it. He needed to hold on to Bo.

She kept shifting around, trying to get away from Nate without moving any further from the door. Nate kept his good arm firmly around her and swayed with her. She was in no state not to telegraph every move she was going to make through their bond, so they were as coordinated as any pack in the midst of a hunt, moving like one animal. Bo turned her head away from the door to snap at him, to nose at his injuries, but she was as aware as Nate was of the countdown in his head; once they were into the last minute she pressed her nose to the crack in the door and stayed there.

The door popped open about six inches, and everything happened at once. The pack-sense snapped into place; Bo's wariness gave way to delight and want that swamped Nate like a wave and he clutched at Bo like a life preserver; Nate looked across the threshold at Brad looking grimly back.

Nate thought nothing but _no_ \--not this, not Brad and Frost, not now. Bo leaned across the threshold, full of nothing but _yes_ as she strained against Nate's grip. 

Nate could feel Frost straining from the other side, dragging against Brad's grip on his scruff. Brad was kneeling just like Nate was, holding on so hard his fingers were cramping and keeping all his own weight on the ground to anchor Frost in place.

Beyond the physical--above and below and all around it--Nate could feel Brad holding Frost still through sheer focused force of will. But Brad wasn't giving off the desperate refusal that Nate could feel pouring out of himself like blood.

Brad was resigned. Brad was under orders. Nate caught a glimpse of memory--Schwetje personally, earnestly informing Brad of the necessity, and Brad's heart sinking as he realized there was no way to refuse, no way to escape the ramifications of the order. They'd been allowed to serve together after the last time, allowed to try, with misgivings and suspicions throughout the company command over it. Even Nate hadn't been sure he could command Brad impartially, but he'd done it, they'd done it--and for nothing, now, because they'd never be allowed to continue as they were after this. They'd never leave Frost under Bo's command after they'd let him be the prize she won for refusing other breeding partners; it was tantamount to the Old Ways, a queen-wolf rejecting all comers until she chose her mate. Frost and Brad would be moved out of Second Platoon with hardly any time to let the platoon adjust to a new team leader before they deployed--and who could replace them? 

But Brad and Frost had been given a lawful order, and they had come to the heat-shack in obedience to it. 

"Sir," Brad said out loud, sounding as strained as he felt through the pack-sense, holding himself and his brother still on the far side of the threshold. 

Nate was dimly aware of the watch team hovering behind him, waiting for the standoff to conclude. They were outside the pack-sense; to them the last half-second had passed in silence. The door hadn't even opened fully.

"If you're going to abort, sir," Brad said. 

_Yes_ , Nate thought, desperate for escape, desperate to have anyone else coming through that door who wasn't Brad, any wolf but Frost, anything happening but this--he'd rather be Mike Bravoed, he'd rather have Bo kill some wolf than this. 

He felt Brad's grip tighten and Brad's weight shift backward. Bo growled low and leaned forward, ready to pursue Frost right through the door. Behind Brad, Nate saw the watch team shifting their weight, raising their weapons. The entry area wasn't nearly as secure as the heat-shack proper, and if Bo went over the threshold they'd drop her again.

But Brad still felt nothing but resignation; not agreement, just acquiescence. He wouldn't force himself on Nate, wouldn't even let the wolves force it on them both. But he had come to the heat-shack under orders, and Nate was under those same orders. Defying them now wouldn't make those orders go away. It wouldn't endear them to Schwetje, or to Godfather. It wouldn't convince anyone that they could still safely serve together--joint defiance of orders would be verging on mutiny now, Nate and Brad going feral instead of Frost and Bo. Command wouldn't tolerate it any better from men than from wolves. 

One way or another, the damage was done; the only question now was whether anything at all might come out of it. The best they could salvage from this now was a litter--Bo and Frost's pups would be needed, highly rated, bred for exactly the war that loomed before them. Nate twisted sideways, burying his face for a few seconds against Bo's back, opening himself to the pack-sense and trying to take in Brad's quiet acceptance to paper over his own frantic denial. Every beat of his heart was still pounding _no no no_ even as his dick throbbed, even as Bo and Frost's mutually targeted _need yes now_ swept over him in a dizzying rush. 

Nate made himself move long before he achieved anything like calm. They didn't have that kind of time. 

He loosened his grip on Bo and pushed himself up to his feet, the pain in his thigh shooting down his leg but nowhere near enough to counter the hardness of his dick. Bo leaped away as soon as his weight was off her, dashing back into the heat-shack with her tail high. Nate turned away to follow her, walking over to the bottle of lube and dropping heavily to his knees. Pain shot through his entire body on impact, and he stared down at the bottle in despair; he wasn't prepped, and as badly as he wanted it--even walking had gotten him harder--prepping now was going to be more pain, and there wasn't even time to prep thoroughly. Brad was fucking legendary, but he was human; his control was going to break once the wolves got down to it.

Frost appeared from behind him, pursuing Bo, and Nate heard the door slam behind him and flinched. Bo didn't let herself be caught right away, darting around the heat-shack. Nate knew he should be using the lead time she was giving him, but he couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't find a way to give himself up to the last thing he wanted.

Brad came around from behind him and dropped to his knees in front of Nate. It occurred to Nate that if Brad had touched him from behind he would have fought or bolted; his whole body was shaking with tension, his hands in fists. Brad knew that, of course. Nate's _no no no_ was all over the pack-sense between them, barely submerged under Bo's heat. Bo was waiting for him, Nate realized. She wanted him to get with the program before she let Frost have her--but she could only stall so long, and Nate was nowhere near ready for this. 

"Nate," Brad said out loud, extending a hand toward Nate's chest. Nate took a breath and nodded a permission he couldn't feel, a lie and a grimly determined truth at the same time, all equally transparent in the pack-sense. Brad pressed his palm over Nate's tattoo, the marks on his body that made him Bo's and brought him here. It was just outside the radius of the growing bruise on his chest. 

Nate looked down at Brad's hand, his arm, Brad's body separated from his by less than an arm's length. Brad was as hard as Nate was, and as naked--he hadn't gotten a condom on beforehand any more than Nate had prepped. 

_Great_ , Nate thought, darkly amused. _No one is ready for this_.

But even as he thought it, he felt how untrue it was. He could feel the wet slick readiness of thorough prep, his ass ready and wanting. Nate flexed, feeling at the same time that he was exactly as tightly closed and dry as he'd thought he was. It still took him a few seconds--staring at Brad's uncovered dick, at the condom held between them in Brad's other hand--to understand. Brad had prepped for him.

Nate dragged his eyes back up to Brad's, even as the pack-sense washed between them with everything he needed to know. They'd told Brad that Nate was hurt. They'd told him Nate's wounds were being treated, and Brad had known that Nate would resist this as he himself had wanted to when he was first given his orders. He'd seen a way to make do. 

"Lie down," Brad said quietly. "Let me do the work this round, your leg's gotta be killing you."

Nate shook his head. His leg didn't fucking matter compared to the rest of it. He raised both hands to Brad's shoulders, dragging him into a kiss, as full of gratitude to the universe for Brad as gratitude to Brad for what he'd done. Brad responded wholeheartedly, his mouth as rough and desperate on Nate's as Nate's on his. Both of them were so keyed up and heat-ridden that even this felt almost unbearably good, the wet friction of mouths and tongues, the hard scrape of teeth. 

The pack-sense between them was full of their mutual memory of the first time they'd kissed, when they were hours beyond the first pleasure of the heat-shack, deep into pain and endurance. They had had each other, then, leaned into each other and supported each other, distracted each other with kisses. They would have each other, still, for this last day that circled right back to where they had begun; they could have this one thing between them that didn't hurt. 

Nate had no resistance left when Brad leaned into him. He dropped his hands from Brad to catch himself, lowering himself down to the floor on his back. Brad straddled him, tore the condom open and rolled it on, and Nate's hips pushed up, thrusting his cock up into Brad's hands. He reacted as much to the feeling of teeth at the back of his neck--Frost had caught Bo at last--as to the friction of latex and Brad's hands on him.

Nate groped sideways and grabbed the lube, bringing it to Brad's hand just as Brad reached for it. Brad slicked him in a few quick strokes while Frost and Bo positioned themselves, and Nate closed his own hand on the base of his cock, steadying it as Brad moved into position himself, shifting his knees wide and lowering himself over Nate. 

Nate let himself fall into the pack-sense, somewhere between Bo and Frost, somewhere between Brad and himself, so it didn't even feel backward to thrust his hips in time with Frost's, to push into Brad as Bo received Frost, all of it at once, all the same heat and tight wet grip, the same joining, the same completion.

There was a ragged cry in the air--his or Brad's or both in unison, Nate had no idea. His hands slapped down on Brad's thighs, holding him down through the first shock of connection. Nate watched through his eyelashes--feeling the effort of it through the pack-sense--as Brad's hands hung open at his sides, palm-out in surrender. Nate gentled his grip as Frost started to move in Bo, pain shooting through his leg as he tried to mirror the motions. 

Brad's fingers twitched and his face went tight with the same pain. He leaned forward, pressing his hands to Nate's hips. 

"Let me do the work," he repeated. His voice and hands were steady, for all his blue eyes were dark with the pleasure of this. Nate could feel just how fast Brad's heart was beating, just how good it felt to him to be filled with Nate's cock.

Nate had to work to remember to keep still, because it felt just as good on his side--finally he wasn't being teased, wasn't waiting. His cock was gripped tight in the slippery heat of Brad's ass, and Brad moved over him at exactly the right pace, the muscles of his thighs bunching and releasing under Nate's hands as he rose and fell on Nate's cock. 

Nate didn't even try to hold back from his first orgasm--he felt like he'd been resisting it for hours already, his cock achingly hard, balls drawn up tight. Brad took him deep as Nate came, grinding on him and leaning forward, planting his hands on Nate's shoulders to hold him still. Nate stared up at him as the pack-sense went distant; he felt like he was suddenly seeing Brad from the outside for the first time, and it made his breath catch. Brad looked down at him with such wild desire that it was almost impossible to comprehend without the pack-sense there to remind Nate where it came from. For just a few seconds--still hard even after he'd come, still buried in Brad's ass--Nate could imagine that this was only them, something they did on their own, something they chose.

Nate fumbled his hand to Brad's cock, as hard as his own and familiar in his grip after the night of the birthday hunt. Brad mouthed curses that Nate couldn't hear; his head tipped back as his eyes fluttered closed, and then the pack-sense crashed back in on him and Nate tightened his grip and bucked his hips up in an almost painful rush of unrelenting need. 

Brad started moving again, slower this time, and with the pack-sense between them Nate could feel his control again. He was pacing himself, pacing both of them. They had hours to go yet.

* * *

Brad slumped over Nate with his hands braced on either side of Nate's shoulders, his head hanging as he breathed in harsh gasps. The first frantic urgency of the wolves faded, ebbing into a breather, and Nate could feel the ache in Brad's thighs and his ass. Nate reached down and secured the condom, and Brad tipped himself forward over Nate just far enough to pull off of Nate's cock. He didn't move any further, keeping Nate boxed in between his hands and knees. Nate lay still, watching and waiting for the moment when Brad would catch his breath and push away to savor these minutes while they weren't compelled to touch. 

Brad lay down instead, his limbs buckling in stages so he tilted sideways first. He came down half on top of Nate, not touching Nate's right thigh or putting any weight on Nate's chest, and staying mostly off Nate's left arm. Nate's cock pressed up against Brad's hip, and Brad's cock was pressed to Nate's side. They were both sticky and sweaty and Nate stared at the ceiling, waiting for the pain of breathing to ease off. His chest was black and purple now, and the ache of it seemed to intensify with every breath, but at least that drowned out every other thought Nate might have entertained. 

Finally Brad shifted back from Nate a little and muttered, "It's not me, it's you," as he rubbed his own chest. 

Nate winced, thinking an apology--not that he could have done anything differently if he'd known Brad would be sharing his injuries--and Brad shook his head and pushed up to his feet. 

Nate, watching him, called out, "Don't limp," after Brad's second stride favoring his right leg.

Brad stopped, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Nate closed his eyes and felt what he felt: the symmetrical soreness of his legs, the not-yet-remarkable ache in his ass. Brad nodded and set out again for the supply lockers, stepping evenly on both legs, and Nate enjoyed the sensation almost as much as anything else they'd done yet. 

Brad opened the lockers and gathered up a box of condoms and bottles of water and packets of bitch pudding. When Brad grabbed the baby wipes, Nate opened his eyes and looked down at himself. Brad's come was drying on his chest, and lube was drying in patches everywhere anyone's hand had touched him, and he really needed to get rid of that condom. 

Brad turned back--Nate could feel his willingness to keep doing all the work--but Nate shook his head and rolled onto his side and then up to his feet by cautious stages. Brad stayed where he was, watching Nate closely but not intruding on his attempt to walk six feet unassisted. Nate limped--Bo, lying in a heap with Frost, raised her head and growled, and Nate flipped her off--over to the head. Once inside the little alcove between shower and toilet, he stripped the condom off and tossed it into the chute. He went to the sink and washed up with actual water, since it was available and he had the time right now. 

He felt Brad drop the baby wipes and come over to the doorway. Nated turned to lean against the sink as Brad held out a bottle of water. Nate took it from him and Brad opened his own. They both drank, and Nate watched Brad watching him--watched the line of Brad's throat, watched sweat drip down his skin--and thought, _My turn next._

He felt Brad's dick jerk at that and the corner of Brad's mouth tilted up while Brad pushed sheepish acknowledgment of his own desire through the pack-sense between them. Nate smiled back--he wanted it too, of course he did, neither of them could help wanting it now--as he finished his bottle of water. Nate tossed the bottle into the chute when he finished it, and he and Brad brushed up against each other trading places as Brad finished his and stepped up to the sink. 

Nate went back out into the heat-shack, casting a weather eye toward the wolves. They were both still looking pretty satisfied with themselves; he should have a few minutes for this. Nate chose his spot, near the lube bottle on the floor, and started easing himself down. Brad stepped up behind him before he'd gotten to his knees and grabbed his good arm, taking half his weight. Nate trusted himself to Brad's grip and dropped the rest of the way. Brad followed him smoothly down; Nate took a few seconds to appreciate the sensation of painless movement before he tipped forward onto hands and knees.

"You only want me for my body," Brad sighed, grabbing the lube before Nate could reach for it. "Let me."

Nate nodded, folding down onto his elbows and letting his head hang as he spread his legs wider for Brad, tilting his ass up. He heard and felt Brad slicking his fingers and remembered to breathe evenly. He tried to make himself relax, but as soon as he started trying on purpose to let it happen he was tensing up again.

Brad moved closer, his knees between Nate's, so that Nate could feel the heat of Brad's body on the backs of his legs and his ass. Brad rubbed his dry hand over the small of Nate's back, and even that made Nate twitch a little. 

"Just me, Nate," Brad said quietly. "No one else. Nothing else. It's just you and me here, and we're just going to do what we want to do for a while."

Nate looked over at the wolves--their presence didn't make this _not_ just him and Brad, not in any way that mattered. Brad's hand moved in patient, soothing circles, a counterpoint to the wanting that burned between them. Nate focused on that--Brad's hand, Brad's warmth, the way he wanted this just as much as Brad did--and of course Brad knew when it was all right. When Brad touched him it wasn't a surprise at all, just a soft slick pressure at his hole, gently working its way into him. 

Nate let out a shaky breath as Brad's finger opened him up. It felt impossible right up until it was happening, and then it felt inevitable. Brad was already brushing up against his prostate, making Nate snarl breathlessly, fresh sweat breaking out on his skin at the jolt of pleasure. Bo lifted her head, interested, and Frost pressed his muzzle to her chin, interested in what she was interested in. 

"We've got time," Brad murmured, drawing his finger slowly out and working it slowly back in. Nate felt dizzy and didn't know if it was pleasure or low blood pressure. He crossed his wrists and propped his forehead on them, and Brad's lips touched the center of his back as Brad's finger worked in and out. Nate arched up into the touch, a mute burst of _please, yes_ before Brad finally added a second finger, stretching him gently open, taking time, as if they could choose the pace of this, as if there were no rush.

But even without any outside pressure, Nate's patience would only last so far. He rocked back onto Brad's hand, wanting more. Brad shifted lower over him-- _stop trying to move, you'll hurt yourself_ \--and sucked kisses along Nate's spine, his fingers moving a little faster. 

He pulled away only to add more lube and another finger, and by then Nate's cheek was wet with condensation from his breath and the wolves were stirring for real. After a few twisting strokes, Brad pulled his fingers free and reached for a condom, and Nate could feel him mentally shuffling through the easiest positions for Nate's arm and leg and generally battered condition. 

Nate made his own choice, rolling over onto his back and dragging his good leg up, letting his injured leg splay to the side. It almost didn't hurt now--as Bo's heat rose up again, swamping the possibility of thought and speech, it hardly hurt at all. Brad was gentle anyway as he moved Nate around, lining himself up, and Nate watched with his own eyes what he couldn't help feeling all through the pack-sense. Brad was slicking himself, biting down hard on his lip as a token defense against the pleasure of his own slippery grip on his cock. He had the condom in place; he was just waiting for the wolves, waiting for the moment when he couldn't resist pushing into Nate.

"Hey," Nate said softly. "Just us, right? We're doing what we want."

Brad's eyes darted up to Nate's, and his teeth flashed in a sudden grin. He leaned forward into Nate's spread legs, pushing Nate into a half-curl, feet in the air and hips turned up at the necessary angle. Bo was still stretching lazily and Frost was sniffing eagerly at her while Brad pushed into Nate, taking the breath from his lungs and sending pleasure flooding through him in an electric overload. 

Bo let out an irritated yip and Nate called back, "That's what you get for dawdling." 

Brad laughed through gritted teeth and pulled back to thrust in again and again before the wolves finally joined them and the differences dissolved. They were just pack, then, lost in what they were doing, but Nate could still lie there and watch Brad. Brad's eyes still stayed fixed on him through it all.

* * *

Sometime past the point when they both started constantly thinking _I can handle this, it's not really worse than last time_ , Nate was lying face down while Brad fucked him. There were some strategically positioned towels from the lockers under his hips and chest, so he could lie with his head on his folded arms and not try to hold himself up, though it did require bracing his elbows on the wall so he wouldn't get fucked out of position. 

Everything hurt, but not enough to signal that it might be over soon; his memories and Brad's agreed on that. And as much as it hurt--from the growing burn in his ass to the new bruises rising on his elbows to the huge one on his chest, to the alarming persistent sharpness of the pain in his thigh and arm--despite all that, Nate was glad that it wasn't almost over yet, because this might be the last time they ever had together. Once this was over, they'd be hustled off for separate medical checks and separate observation periods. Brad might well be reassigned and shipped out before Nate was allowed to make an unsupervised move. They'd probably have pack-sense access to each other until Brad and Frost were physically out of reach--Nate somehow doubted anyone was going to allow them the nicety of having Bo officially release Frost from the pack-sense--but then again Nate was probably going to be doped to the fucking gills once he got out of here.

 _You'd fucking better be_ , Brad thought. _Only way that leg is going to heal is if you stay the fuck off it. I'd be slipping you sleeping pills if--_

The thought cut off sharply, and Nate opened his eyes and stared at the blue blur past his nose--the padded floor of the heat-shack--while Brad fucked him slowly and relentlessly and the wolves matched them and dragged them on. 

"Who," Nate said out loud, and then remembered that breathing hurt and talking made it hurt worse. 

_Who the fuck am I going to put in charge of Team One?_

They would have to give him another E-5--probably a one-to-one swap, Brad for someone whose billet he could step into. Whoever he was, he'd be a stranger; if they did it right, and got Brad and Frost completely clear of Nate and Bo, the new TL would be from Parris Island, someone they'd never crossed paths with before. 

Even before an answer, Nate got the comforting sense that Brad had been working on the solution to that problem since the moment he was ordered to the heat-shack.

 _Rudy and Pappy_ , Brad offered, and Nate closed his eyes and nodded, letting the logic of it unfold in the pack-sense between them. Rudy and Pappy's bond would keep the Team One vehicles effortlessly united, and it _probably_ wouldn't mean Rudy and Pappy being really separated from each other much; if it did they would understand the necessity of it. Rudy had more than enough respect from the men to function as the quasi-TL that Poke had been up to now, and Pappy was well-respected, eldest of the TLs and closely associated with Brad. Team One wouldn't be the foundation of unassailable strength it could have been, but it would function, and the rest of the platoon would function with it.

 _Leave Ray with Pappy in the lead vehicle_ , Brad advised. _Move Poke and Trombley to team two with the new guy, Poke can keep him in line and Trombley's used to listening to him._

Neither of them articulated, but both of them knew, that Brad's departure meant writing off any real attempt to integrate Trombley and Lucky into the pack-sense. Ray would be needed in the lead vehicle with Pappy, and Pappy and Hurricane were too disconcerted by Trombley and Lucky to keep them on Pappy's team. Without Navi and Frost's combined efforts, there was no chance of getting Lucky and Trombley to fit in; the best Tony and Doom would be able to do would be to keep Trombley's SAW pointed in the right direction. That did still beg the question of who Tony would be ATL for; the stranger would be a totally unknown quantity.

 _You've gotta get political_ , Brad offered, his thought nudging gently at Nate's automatic resistance to the idea while his cock plowed steadily into Nate's ass. 

_For the men_ , Brad insisted. _For the platoon's ability to function. You can use this. You can play up what a good little officer you were, getting fucked according to orders even though it cost you a team leader. Get them to swap the new guy into Third Platoon and give you Kocher._

Nate had to admit that that made at least as much sense as Rudy and Pappy. Kocher had also been a part of Brad and Pappy's team in Afghanistan--it had been his brother, Eagle, who was injured, which meant that Kocher had also been on the watch team at the heat-shack, but Nate's few interactions with him had already proven that his attitude toward Nate matched Pappy's. Kocher would fit as neatly into the pack-sense with Pappy as Pappy did with Brad, and all the men were familiar with him and knew the association. Eagle would defer naturally to Hurricane; the whole platoon would fit together almost the same way it was meant to. 

_Better with you, though_ , Nate thought. 

Brad pressed his mouth to the back of Nate's neck and did not disagree.

* * *

It wasn't that it hurt so much, really; Nate's sense of his own body came and went in waves like a signal light flashing. The pack-sense was sharper and more immediate than his own senses, and Bo, of course, was most immediate of all.

Bo's heat was all-consuming, leaving little awareness for anything but Frost and their joining. The pack-sense flowed between them and their brothers, a reassuring harmony, but it could not draw Bo's attention away from her need and the fulfillment of that need. 

It was only when the urgency began to fade--still tied to Frost, but only waiting to be finished and rest a while--that she could turn her attention to her brother, checking that he was all right. He smelled, as he had for endless hours now, of blood and pain and exhaustion under the welcome reek of sex. 

But something was wrong now. He was lying too still. Brad, straddling him, was poking at the bruised spot on Nate's chest even as he continued to rise and fall slowly on Nate's hard cock. Nate lay with his face turned away from Brad, one arm covering his eyes. He still breathed--he was present, dimly and distantly, in the pack-sense--but he didn't respond to Brad's increasingly rough touches or his increasingly frantic voice. 

"Nate, where the fuck are you? _Nate, wake up_."

Nate didn't respond, and Bo added a yip of anxiety that drew Brad's attention to her. He pulled off of Nate, and the sudden disjunction--two of them separate and two of them joined--snapped through the pack-sense like pain, sharper and more inescapable than the way Brad had been prodding at Nate. 

Brad pushed through the sensation, crossing the distance to Bo and dropping to his knees in front of her to look her in the eye. 

"Bo," he said, swaying forward. He smelled of exhaustion and pain himself, an echo of her brother. He raised a hand and Bo caught it carefully in her mouth. 

Brad pressed his palm against the points of her teeth as he said, "Bo, is Nate okay? Can you feel him?"

There was a babble of human voice from somewhere above, but Brad paid no attention to it, and neither did Bo. She turned all her attention to Nate, pushing at him through their bond as Brad had with his hand. _Fresh ink on a sun-warmed page_ , forceful though not frantic. She knew Nate was safe, she could feel him near, but--

Nate blinked his own eyes, looking over at the tableau of Brad and the wolves from under his arm, but there was still something not quite right. He could still see-smell-sense his own body, limp and filthy and battered, from across the room; Bo's senses were still more present than his own.

 _Here_ , he managed. The thought, and the self thinking it, still felt like they were floating somewhere in the middle of the heat-shack between his body and Bo's.

Bo felt relieved and angry all over again, Brad mostly just relieved; Nate felt himself settle more firmly into his own body as Brad tore himself away from Bo and came back to kneel beside him.

 _What the fuck, what the fuck,_ Brad was demanding, and there was still a jumble of sound coming from overhead that Nate couldn't parse, disconnected as it was from the pack-sense. 

_Sorry_ , Nate thought, eyes closed. He didn't need his eyes to know the look on Brad's face, and now that it had found him he couldn't disconnect himself from Brad's lingering frantic concern. _Easier to only feel what Bo felt for a while._

"Fucking Christ," Brad said out loud, and then, nonsensically, "Yes, fucking come in here and get him before he passes fucking out again."

Nate frowned--the brokenness in the pack-sense was getting weirder the more he settled into his own body, on the lonely and separate side of the divide, and Brad wasn't doing anything to fix that. Nate tried to reach for him, and knew immediately that it wasn't Brad's hand that caught his wrist as it rose. He tried to pull away--what the fuck were strangers doing in the heat-shack--but Brad pushed _hold still, let them take care of you_ so hard that Nate obeyed without thinking, and then nothing.

* * *

"There you are."

The words were in Nate's ears and in the pack-sense and were a sensation of finding-and-reunion-and-relief in the pack-sense, all at once. Nate opened one eye, just as a formality, to see Mike sitting in a chair beside his infirmary bed. 

Nate was lying--had been carefully positioned--on his side, and Bo was stretched along his back, propping him up. She had permitted Ash to curl up against the front of Nate's legs, and Ash's muzzle rested just past the edge of the bandage on Nate's thigh. He wasn't wearing much beyond bandages and wolves, but he was clean and quiet; Bo's heat had ended without him being aware of it. Now Nate felt awake and not in nearly as much pain as he should have been. 

Mike nodded, smiling. "You are drugged to fuck and gone, and your range isn't worth shit."

"Sounds right," Nate agreed, and winced at the sound of his own voice even as he tested his and Bo's pathetic range in the pack-sense. He could access only a dim consciousness of the rest of the platoon--but they were all there, all complete, no stranger and no empty place breaking the shape of them.

"It being a solo Brad's getting the same twenty-four hours as you," Mike explained. "Pappy and Rudy took him home, but Ray's been doing most of the actual babysitting."

In the pack-sense, Mike made it clear that this consisted mostly of sitting by Brad's bedside, monitoring his sleep, much as Mike had been doing for Nate--to somewhat less purpose, as Brad had been in better physical condition than Nate at the abrupt end of the breeding. But Brad was still asleep under Ray's watchful eye and still, so far, a part of Second Platoon. 

"Nobody's said a word about it," Mike agreed. "Just got notice that your debrief with the CO is scheduled for about one minute after the end of your twenty-four."

Nate felt a sudden swelling horror at the thought of Brad's debrief being handled by Griego, and Mike leaned forward, pressing his hand to Nate's arm and a strong wordless reassurance through the pack-sense. 

"Sergeant Major pulled rank. He's warming up to give Brad a good yelling-at about continuing to respect the authority of officers be they bitches or dogs who he has or has not ever fucked or ever had any expectation of fucking."

Nate sighed relief. Brad could handle--Nate could handle Brad handling--getting lectured by Sixta. There wouldn't be any oily, false concern or covert prodding for weaknesses. Sixta would hit the required points of the briefing and spend the rest of it showing utter disdain for any possible effect the experience might have on Brad's ability to serve under (or behind or on top of) any given officer.

Mike snorted agreement and sat back again. 

"I had Cara call Jill, tell her you were pretty banged up and needed to sleep it off in the infirmary," Mike added, eyes on his hands, as if that would give Nate any meaningful privacy.

Nate closed his eyes but said hoarsely, "Thanks."

He hadn't thought of her once; of course he hadn't. There was no part of this that touched her. She was something separate, someone safe. But right now the thought of her waiting for him didn't feel like having a refuge to turn to.

"Get some more sleep," Mike said quietly. "You've got a while yet before the end of your twenty-four."

Bo ratified Mike's suggestion, nosing at Nate's cheek to press him down into his pillow, licking him like a wayward pup. Nate knew when he was overruled, and he let himself be pushed down into sleep.

* * *

Before he was fully aware of anything Nate was making an effort to hold the pain of his injuries to himself, keeping it out of the pack-sense. It wasn't actually difficult--Bo, now that she wasn't in heat, was capable of filtering for him, and Ash was right beside her, backing up her efforts--but it was an effort that brought him to full consciousness as he focused on it. 

Once he was sure he wasn't hurting his men or the wolves, Nate extended a cautious unfolding of awareness in their direction. They were all still there, all oppressed by a sense of change coming like an approaching thunderstorm, waiting for it to break. 

All except Brad. Nate couldn't feel anything from Brad at all, except that he was alive and in reasonably good health. He was closed off tightly, back behind his layer of ice. He had to be bracing for his debriefing.

At that thought, Nate opened his eyes and asked--of anyone, of the pack-sense at large-- _time?_

He got back a flurry of clock-glances and sky-observations--1528, cloudy--and, from Mike, the time he actually needed. Nate had forty-five minutes left in the twenty-four hour observation period, and just over an hour until he was expected at Captain Schwetje's office for debriefing. 

Ash was still lying against Nate's legs and Bo was still at his back, but Mike was gone--on his way back now, Nate realized, with food. Nate's stomach clenched on emptiness at the thought, and he gently shoved both wolves away. Neither budged very far, but they let him sit up, which hurt enough that Nate was sweating by the time he'd gotten his legs swung over the side of the bed. Ash pressed against Nate's side, helping him keep his balance. Bo ducked past him, picking up the boxers sitting on the chair by the bed and dropping them on Nate's lap. 

Nate huffed and handed them back, and Bo slipped down from the bed ahead of him. Nate kept one arm around Ash as he eased his feet down to the floor and Bo dropped his boxers where he could step into them. He forced himself to bend over to pull them up--fuck, he'd been able to move as much as he needed to twenty-four hours ago--

"You didn't need to move that much," Mike pointed out, coming through the door as Nate hauled his boxers gingerly up over his ass. "And if you'll pardon the expression, you've stiffened up a lot in the last day."

Nate snorted an obedient laugh--he wasn't going to be getting it up anytime soon--and reached out for the takeout bag in Mike's hand. Mike came over and set it on the bed, and Nate accepted the nudge through the pack-sense, hauling himself back onto the bed with Ash's help. As soon as Nate was settled Ash slipped out from under his arm and Bo took her place. Nate steadied himself against his sister as he picked up the bag and pulled out a paper-wrapped sandwich. 

He unwrapped it and began to eat as Mike knelt in front of him and got his socks on him, and Nate asked silently, _How are we holding up?_

Mike only sighed out loud. _The platoon's identified every possible recon E-5 who could get swapped into the platoon, from Kocher to some asshole somebody heard about from a guy who knows a guy at Parris Island. They've ranked them all on a scale from "I guess he'd be acceptable" to "Already figured out where to get rid of the body" and they're all about one loud fart away from grabbing their E-tools and digging a shallow grave. Brad hasn't let out a stray thought one way or the other since he woke up, you've been unfuckingconscious, and our CO...._

Nate winced, swallowed, and redirected his attention. _Person, what's the status on Bravo Two's supply of flux capacitors?_

There was a pause--something like a hiccup in the pack-sense--and Ray came back with the over-precision of anxious control. _Back to the drawing board due to something called quantum physics, sir. I'm looking into it._

Nate nodded. _Antennae?_

 _The_ antennas _are pretty much done_ , Ray promised, dutifully rising to Nate's bait. _Waiting on parts for the last couple of vehicles and then we'll be good to go, sir_. 

Ray felt anxious but determined which was, frankly, no more than Nate would expect Brad to be demanding of him. Ray was Brad's closest friend in the platoon, and would probably be more personally impacted than anyone by Brad's reassignment. Ray and Navi were absolutely crucial to holding the platoon together in Brad's absence; Ray would know that, Brad would know that, and Nate certainly knew that.

 _We'll go over it when I get out of the debriefing_ , Nate assured Ray, and he got back an obedient agreement from Ray before Mike intervened between Nate and the rest of the platoon, shouldering them away from Nate's attention.

Nate let Mike take over, mechanically putting away the rest of his food while Mike propagated Nate's presence to the entire platoon. It didn't leave them feeling much better--nothing would, until Brad's departure and replacement were settled--but it calmed them down enough that Nate could focus on the debriefing ahead of him.

Mike helped him dress, swatting Nate's hands away when he went to peel up an edge of the bandage on his thigh. 

"It's pretty nasty looking," Mike said, giving Nate a memory of the ragged gashes across the front of his leg. "They couldn't stitch it by the time you got out, so you got a couple dozen butterflies holding it together. If you run or fall or hit it on anything and start it bleeding again, every corpsman who's worked on you is going to line up to kick your ass."

"Again," Nate said, because that suggested a lot going on that he didn't remember, but Mike didn't give him anything through the pack-sense to explain.

Out loud, he said curtly, "You lost enough blood to worry everybody."

Nate fastened up his pants and shuffled through his own memories--they got pretty fragmentary toward the end, when he'd been pushing his awareness away into Bo to escape his own body. He remembered Brad sounding and feeling and smelling angry and scared, calling in the medics. Bo, still close at his side, nudged anxiously at Nate, and Nate turned and pressed his face against the top of her head in apology for worrying her. 

When he'd finished getting dressed a corpsman came in and gave him a pro forma once-over; halfway through, Nate realized it was almost the same set of motions he had had to go through to prove himself fit for breeding. When he straightened up from touching his toes without blacking out, he realized abruptly that the corpsman in front of him was the one who'd checked his blood pressure in the heat-shack.

The corpsman smiled at Nate's look of recognition, and offered a hand to shake, which Nate took. "Feeling any better now?"

Nate shrugged. "I'll do."

The corpsman nodded. "Gunny's got your wound care instructions. Check in again in three days to have it looked at, sooner if it seems like anything is infected or starts bleeding again or hurting worse."

Nate agreed, and then he was free to go. Mike and Ash accompanied him and Bo out of the infirmary and halfway to the captain's office before their paths diverged. Bo stayed pressed as close to Nate's right leg as she could be without actually bumping into him, ready to catch him if his leg gave out. Nate concentrated on not limping too much and on keeping himself coiled up tight in the pack-sense. He remembered Brad's advice-- _get political, get Kocher_. That was the best he could do for his men now, and that was all that mattered here.

He didn't let himself check on Brad. Brad wasn't his to worry about anymore, even if the word hadn't officially come down yet.

Bo, at his side, grumbled in the pack-sense over this resignation to losing Frost and Brad. _They're ours. Captain gave them to us. Why should he take them away?_

Nate set his hand on top of Bo's head. _You're getting to be too much like mates_ , Nate pointed out, and let _mates_ carry all the history of the Old Ways, when an alpha bitch hadn't been an officer but a queen-wolf, ruling her own pack and choosing a mate to rule it beside her--and thus her mate's brother to lead the men of the wolfthreat. _You're not allowed to choose Frost and promote Brad over Mike. Or over me._

Bo huffed at the ridiculousness of it. _They belong to us, of course they wouldn't go over you._

Nate shook his head. _It doesn't matter. We're Marines, and only platoon commanders. We have a chain of command above us. We don't get to choose our men or our breeding partners._

Bo huffed again--she couldn't dispute Nate's point--and stayed quiet at his side the rest of the way to Schwetje's office, where Schwetje and Yellowjacket awaited them. Nate saluted properly, thankful as he did that Bo had gotten him by the left arm and not the right. Schwetje returned the salute as Yellowjacket responded to Bo's bow with the usual amiable lick on the face. Yellowjacket retreated to Schwetje's side of the desk and Nate sat down gingerly in the visitor's chair, leaning his weight as much as possible onto his thighs and off his ass as Bo settled down next to him. 

Schwetje grabbed a folder, frowning thoughtfully down at it, and Nate felt a sudden déjà vu: they'd found out they were getting Brad and Frost just like this, four months ago. As he realized that, Nate also realized that he was holding himself almost entirely shut off from his pack-sense link with his CO. He couldn't sense Schwetje's state of mind at all, and had nothing to go on but that pensive scowl, which he'd learned could mean anything. It would be smarter, Nate knew, to open himself up, to ingratiate himself in the pack-sense or at least prepare himself for whatever Schwetje was about to say. 

It also felt exactly like telling himself to kneel down on the floor and grab the bottle of lube. Nate stayed closed tight and reached down to set his hand on Bo's head while he waited.

Schwetje finally looked up and gave Nate an up-and-down look that made Nate focus on holding himself very still and keeping his hands at his sides. He was not as naked as he felt, and he knew it.

"Nate, I know you had good intentions and you did what you thought you had to do at the time," Schwetje said slowly, "but you know you're never supposed to try to break up two wolves by getting between them. You could have gotten hurt a lot worse. As it is, you've compromised your combat-readiness. What if we were to get an order to deploy tomorrow?"

Nate stayed silent until it became obvious that Schwetje actually expected an answer for that. He looked down at his hands as he tried to come up with a sufficiently diplomatic one.

"I had to make a split second decision, sir, and I believed that greater injury would result to the wolves, myself, the other wolfbrother, and possibly the watch team, if I allowed the attack to proceed. As we have been on eight days warning for the last few months, I believed that I would have sufficient time to heal from any injuries before a possible deployment, especially since injury is always a possibility whenever I go into the heat-shack with my sister."

It was common, of course, for a male wolf's brother to go in and out of a heat-shack without taking any injury. A bitch's brother always suffered aftereffects, even if nothing went wrong in the way it had for Bo. Nate's injuries were far from the worst he'd heard of after even a successful breeding.

"Sure, Nate," Schwetje said, nodding, "I get that. You did what you had to do. But maybe there was another way to do that so you wouldn't get hurt like you did. You have to think about that, you know? You're a valuable resource and your men need you to be in top condition. How does it look for them if you're already limping around when you're leading them into battle?"

Nate gritted his teeth and rubbed his thumb behind Bo's ear, willing her not to voice the growl he was choking back. "I understand, sir. I will consider that in the future."

Schwetje blinked a couple of times and then nodded, seeming placated. He looked down at the folders in front of him again and added off-handedly, "I know things didn't go how they were supposed to. BreedCom was pretty sure giving you a wolf off the _Peleliu_ would do the trick."

Bo and Nate both stiffened in unison at that casual assertion. Bo immediately began rehearsing the scent-catalogue of every wolf she'd encountered, directly or by lingering smell, aboard the _Peleliu_. The wolf certainly hadn't been Rocket, who she'd met, but it hadn't been any other wolf she remembered either. 

Nate didn't bother trying to place him; he could see how it had happened. Sometime in the last nine months, that officer and wolf had been transferred onto the _Peleliu_ , and they were the ones who had been available when a backup _Peleliu_ wolf was needed to put to Bo. 

For a few reckless seconds Nate entertained thoughts of explaining that the whole point of a _Peleliu_ wolf was _not sending a stranger into the heat-shack_ , but he swallowed the impulse. He would be politic. He would focus on his goals. He needed a good TL out of this; he needed that a lot more than he needed to argue with his CO over what boiled down to a clerical error at BreedCom. His leg throbbed with his speeding pulse, and Nate pressed the heel of his hand down just above the wound.

"I guess you'll want him on your exclusion list," Schwetje added, giving Nate another lingering speculative below-the-neck look. Meaning, Nate supposed, that Nate wouldn't want to see him again because Nate had been injured, and not because Nate might still want to _kill him_. 

Still, Nate nodded jerkily. "Yes, sir. That would be best."

Schwetje nodded. "That's your ten, then."

Nate's mind went utterly blank at the implication in Schwetje's satisfied tone of finality. Bo lifted her head in surprise, and Nate couldn't spare the effort even to push her back down to mirror Yellowjacket's posture. 

Schwetje noticed Nate's silence after nearly a minute. "That's all we really need to settle here, Nate, unless--if you want to talk, you know I'm here for you. Was there something else?"

Nate actually bit his tongue to keep from laughing or speaking. He lowered his eyes and leaned down to press his open hand against the back of Bo's neck until she sighed and settled back down with her muzzle on her paws. 

When Nate looked up again he was able to say quite calmly, "Sir, I understood that exceptions to the ten-wolf limit on the exclusion list were available when circumstances warranted."

Schwetje frowned. "Nothing's changed, Nate. We had this conversation back in August, and you told me you could handle commanding Colbert and Frost even though you'd been in the heat-shack together. That's the only reason I signed off on the in-company waiver for him to be the alternate this time--otherwise the breeding probably would have failed."

Nate gritted his teeth. He couldn't say, _Of course it would have failed, she's a SERE bitch, we all knew it could fail_ , and he couldn't say... he couldn't say any of the things he was thinking. He couldn't even think them too loudly.

"If you can't handle commanding him anymore, you'd better say so now, Nate," Schwetje said, looking concerned and disappointed. "But it's not going to look good, you know."

Nate wanted to say _Of course I_ except that he didn't know whether the word after that was _can_ or can't. 

He considered what he was doing for about half a second and then reached through the pack-sense for Brad, finding him cracked slightly open the first time since Nate woke up in the infirmary. He was as confused and off-balance as Nate felt. That had to mean that Brad was getting the same word from Sixta that Nate was getting from Schwetje, and didn't know what to make of it any more than Nate did.

Schwetje was giving him a hard look now--he could tell Nate had reached out, at the very least, if not that he had reached out to Brad--and Nate withdrew into himself again.

"Nate, this is a question for you, not anybody else. You're the platoon commander. You have to command. You can do this, can't you?"

There was only one answer to that question. Nate knew it was the wrong fucking question, but it was the question he was being asked, and there was only one way to answer it. "Yes, sir. I can."

Schwetje's face cleared, and he flipped open the folder in front of him. "Good, Nate. Glad to hear it. What with the president's announcement today, we're going to need to be ready to roll any time now, and I wouldn't want you to have to shuffle your platoon at the last minute."

" _The president's_ \--" Nate said, too sharply, and Bo lifted her head again, hackles rising, as Nate cut himself off.

Schwetje frowned. "It was on TV, Nate, and it's all over the pack-sense."

But Mike had been keeping himself between Nate and everything else, in the few minutes when Nate hadn't had himself locked down as hard as he could. "Sir, I've been awake barely an hour of the twenty-four since my sister's heat ended. For most of that time I was sedated and couldn't access the pack-sense."

Schwetje gave him a significant look--Nate didn't have that excuse now--but conceded far enough to say, "The president announced today that troops are definitely going to the Middle East in case Saddam keeps resisting the UN inspectors. We could be stepping off any time now."

* * *

Nate got through the last of the debriefing by focusing on keeping himself entirely closed off. He was barely conscious of his surroundings at all until he was halfway across Camp Margarita with Bo at his side. She closed her teeth delicately on the sleeve of his blouse--not his wrist, just the cloth--and tugged Nate to a halt, focusing his attention on her.

 _Relax_ , Bo demanded, when Nate was listening. _We won! We do get to choose. We got to keep them._

All of the horrified rejection that Nate had been suppressing for the last several minutes broke free at the moment when his sister declared her de facto mutiny. Nate grabbed her by the scruff and one leg and flipped her like she was a pup, dropping her to the concrete on her back and falling half on top of her. 

Bo was too startled to resist, and Nate lay still where he'd landed, staring into her eyes and screaming a silent _NO_ with all the pain in his leg and all the fear and all the exhaustion that was pent up in him from the last two days. 

_No. We don't choose. We can't choose. We were just let off the hook._

_But he asked,_ Bo pointed out. _He let us choose and you told him we wanted--_

 _It wasn't a real question_ , Nate insisted. _It was a human question, rhetorical. It was always up to him. We don't choose. We don't get to choose. Our CO chooses and we obey._

Bo huffed annoyance and started pushing back against Nate, snapping her teeth in his direction and wriggling around for leverage. _He was scared of what we could--_

" _No_ ," Nate snarled out loud, and was conscious as he did that he was in the middle of a public thoroughfare, and that someone was standing nearby, watching him. He nearly snapped at whoever it was--public as they were, this was a private exchange with his sister--and then Bo helpfully supplied the pack-sense connection to identify the watcher.

Nate sprang to his feet and to attention, and Bo stayed on her back. 

Godfather came only close enough to be heard if he spoke, staying well out of arm's reach of Nate; his brother, Capo, darted in to set one massive paw on Bo's chest. He didn't have to push, didn't even have to show his teeth. He just stood there, and Bo went as limp as a day-old pup under him. 

"Sir," Nate said, keeping all his weight on his left leg as he saluted. 

Godfather returned the salute with a smile that looked weirdly fond in the face of Nate's screaming adrenaline rush. He knew he was closed off, but he couldn't actually be fooling First Recon's battalion commander.

"Sisters, huh," Godfather said, jerking his chin at Bo. "Sometimes you gotta make your point the old-fashioned way."

Nate nodded, glancing toward Capo. When Ferrando had first been commissioned he'd bonded to a bitch, just as Nate had; he'd had fifteen years with Athena before she was killed. His experience of being a bitch's brother was more than a decade longer than Nate's. 

"It's a shame officer-bitches never get along," Godfather went on. "You and Bo could have learned a lot serving with Captain Patterson and his Athena in Alpha Company."

 _His_ Athena, not to be confused with Godfather's late sister. Nate nodded again. He'd liked Patterson, the little he'd ever gotten to know him; Bo and Athena were both too territorial to let them spend much time in the same vicinity. Patterson would have understood; Patterson wouldn't have done this to him. Godfather should also understand, but Godfather just stood there looking warmly at Bo, like this was all an amusing little temper tantrum.

"I'm not going to interfere in company command structure," Godfather said, and Nate looked up sharply, only to be greeted by the same slight smile. "But if you ever needed advice from a bitch's brother--I understand if you might not want to come to me, Nate, but you can tell your sister to take a hike and go to Patterson."

"Sir," Nate agreed.

Godfather nodded firmly. "We expect great things from you and your sister, Lieutenant Fick. Great things. She's got instincts that have been bred in her for a thousand years--but it's up to you to control those instincts. Wolves are our strength, but ultimately men rule the Marine Corps. Restraint and wisdom, that has to come from us."

Nate nodded mutely, and Godfather's gaze shifted past him. When Nate turned his head to look, Capo stepped off of Bo and walked away without any flourishes, without giving any sign that he'd particularly asserted himself.

Godfather turned away with his brother at his side, and then turned back, frowning, and said, "You didn't hurt your leg again, did you, Nate?"

Nate shifted his weight slightly back to the right. "It'll be fine, sir."

Godfather smiled, nodded, and walked off.

Nate watched him until he turned out of sight and then doubled over, pressing the heel of his hand against the pressure bandage, gritting his teeth on everything that wanted out. He tipped his head up just enough to meet Bo's eyes where she still lay on the ground.

 _We did not win_ , Nate repeated. _We are not in charge of one fucking thing they don't put us in charge of._

Bo lay her head down on her paws and, just this once, did not argue. Nate let his head drop and kept breathing. 

A few seconds later Mike's hands were on his shoulders. "Jesus, Nate, what did you do to yourself? Nobody can get anything from you or Brad, you're both locked down like fucking missile silos."

Nate nodded and straightened up when Mike braced him, ignoring the decidedly wet sensation when he took his hand off the bandage. "Good. I need to talk to Brad, and I need to keep it out of the pack-sense."

Mike shook his head, scowling down at Nate's leg. "You need to go back to the infirmary."

* * *

Once he'd had his leg re-bandaged--and been sufficiently bitched out by everyone on duty in the infirmary--Mike hauled Nate to the mess. It was only when Nate registered how empty it was that it occurred to him to think about the date. 

"Yep," Mike said. "Guys have been bugging out all day for their Christmas leaves."

Nate redid the head count he'd done when he woke up barely an hour before in the infirmary, but it came up the same: all of Bravo Two was still on base or near enough to be firmly connected to the pack-sense. 

Mike shrugged. "Nobody wanted to leave with the pack-sense unsettled like this--especially with what the president said about it being soon. I didn't let any of the guys flying out tonight change their plans, but if they have to unplug from the platoon when it's this fucked up, nobody's having a merry fucking Christmas, Nate. We need to get the platoon squared away. What's going on?"

Nate fixed his gaze on his plate. Bo pulled her head out of his lap and curled down small under his chair. 

"Nothing's happening," Nate said finally. He could feel the pressure of Mike reaching for him through the pack-sense, but he couldn't allow even that; he could barely share his mind with Bo right now. Leaking this into the pack-sense would only make everything worse. "No change. Brad's not being reassigned."

"Bull--" Mike stopped short, not out of any kind of delicacy, but from pure speechless shock.

Nate nodded without looking up. "I need to talk to Brad. What happens next--we have to make it happen. We have to make it work. It's on us to get the platoon squared away."

"Nate," Mike said, even as Nate felt him give up pushing at Nate through the pack-sense. "You do understand the irony of trying to _not_ fuck up the platoon by secretly coordinating with Brad."

Nate snorted and nodded. "Feel free to stop me if you see any fucking way around it, Gunny. I have to know where he is on this. I'm not going to--" Nate stopped short of saying _order him_. There were plenty of things he could and would order Brad to do; what he wouldn't do to Brad was what Schwetje had done to him, and he couldn't say that out loud or anywhere else.

Mike was silent for a few seconds and then started eating again, shaking his head a little but offering no alternative and no further protest. When Nate was nearly done eating, Mike said, "As much as I admire your firm grasp of your priorities, I feel compelled to remind you that today is December 21st and your family's arriving for Christmas tomorrow."

It was Nate's turn to come to a total speechless halt; he couldn't square his parents and sisters and grandma coming to visit for Christmas with everything that had happened in the last two days and was still unraveling before him. 

"Fuck," Nate said, as another complete incongruity fell into place. "Jill. I still haven't--"

Mike shifted in his seat and then set Nate's cell phone on the table and slid it across to him. Nate settled his hand over it gingerly, and Mike stood up, taking his tray and Nate's as he walked away. Nate watched him all the way out of the mess and then got up slowly, in painful stages. He took his phone to his office, where he could lock himself in and be as alone as he was anywhere. Bo came and sat directly between his feet as he hit Jill's speed dial.

"Hi, this is Jill--"

Nate's mouth dropped open at the sound of her voice. A sense of helpless enormity rushed over him; he had no idea what to say, or how to sum this up to someone who was so far outside the frame of reference for it. He couldn't tell her stories about this, and he didn't know what else he could say without telling her what had happened and was still happening.

"--leave a message after the beep. If that's you, Nate, I've been thinking about you and Bo all day! I hope you're okay."

Nate's eyes closed. Of course. He'd asked her not to pick up the phone the first time he called. He swallowed hard and summoned up more bland, diplomatic words. 

"It's me," Nate said. "I think Mike said Cara talked to you--I don't know what she told you, but some things went wrong during the breeding. Bo and I are physically fine--" Bo made an irritated noise and nudged his thigh hard, just below the bandage-- "but I need to stay here and work some things out. I'll call again when I can. If you talk to my family at all--you can tell them we're okay, and I'll be at the airport tomorrow like we planned. Thanks." 

No, Nate realized, _thanks_ was the wrong word. It should have been _I love you_. But those words sat heavy on his tongue now that he'd thought of them so consciously, and the pause had stretched too long. Nate hung up.

* * *

Nate stayed holed up in his office doing paperwork, which had never been so soothingly monotonous, until well after dark. By then he was hours into the proper start of his own liberty. Several members of Bravo Two peeled away for long-distance leave, and Bo dozed uneasily at his feet, reluctantly loosening her grip on them in the pack-sense as they went. 

When the feel of the base around him had gone night-weekend-holiday quiet, Nate reached out into the fractured pack-sense of the men and wolves who remained. Brad was still there, of course; he opened up at a touch, exactly enough for Nate to place him down at the beach. 

_Stay put_ , Nate directed, and in return he felt Brad dig his heels into the sand before the contact closed off sharply.

Nate changed into civvies and slipped out to his car with Bo trotting ahead of him, finding him the least-populated path. He didn't have to speak to anyone--barely nodded to the gate guard on his way out--all the way to the beach. He parked next to Brad's truck and then turned to look at Bo.

"We need to be alone for this," Nate said. "Brad and I need to be separate from the pack."

Bo gave him a wary look, and Nate nodded grimly.

"We had a chance to say no to our CO, even if it wasn't a real choice. I have to give Brad the same chance, and this one time I am going to mean it. I don't want Brad and Frost in our platoon if they don't want to be here." 

Bo rejected the entire concept of that; _obviously_ Brad and Frost would choose to be part of Bravo Two, and they should in no way be encouraged to consider any other possibility.

"No," Nate said. "If they're not--" _ours_ , he couldn't help thinking, and Bo looked faintly triumphant. Nate glared, reminding her of who they really belonged to: Godfather and Capo, Schwetje and Yellowjacket. 

"If they're not willing to be part of the platoon anymore we will not force them to stay. They'd be worse than Lucky if they wanted to be somewhere else all the time." 

Nate made himself actually think of it, vividly enough to make Bo understand: Brad and Frost feeling trapped, resenting Nate and Bo for keeping them in an untenable situation, their silent discontent contaminating the platoon in exactly the way Nate and Bo had relied on their professionalism to be transmitted.

Bo shook her head sharply, dispelling Nate's imaginings like water in her ears, but she grudgingly conceded the hypothetical point. If Brad and Frost really didn't want to stay, she wouldn't force them to. Not like that.

"I need this to be private from the rest of the pack until the decision is made, one way or the other. Brad and Frost can't choose freely with fifteen guys watching. I need you to keep us cut off from everyone else."

Bo tilted her head--interested and considering--as she sent Nate an assurance that she could make that happen. 

Nate sent back a quick _not yet_ and made himself unbend enough to reach out to Mike. _I'm with Brad. If we drop out of the pack-sense completely, you know why_.

Mike's recoil in the pack-sense was worth a dozen spoken curses; the only actual sense he gave to Nate was _Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid_.

Anything stupid, in Mike's thought, was colored mostly with the kinds of violations of regs that Nate wasn't going to be getting up to with anybody for a while. 

_Just talking,_ Nate promised, giving Mike an image of the beach and the pier and closing himself off again before Mike could tell him how stupid just talking might be. Nate got out of the truck and Bo followed him out on his side so he could more easily shut the door after her. 

They both realized at the same moment that the white shape among the waves under the pier was Frost swimming. Brad was standing another fifty meters south, and Nate turned resolutely toward him with Bo running a little ahead on the shoreward side. They came across Brad's shoes first; Brad himself was standing down on the wet sand, still a few meters short of the water line. 

Nate stood for a moment looking at him against the starry darkness of the ocean and sky. The moon and the city light were all behind them, and Brad stood with his back to all of it. Then Nate toed off his go-fasters--leaning on Bo to do it without falling--and tucked his socks into them, leaving them on the sand beside Brad's. 

Bo lay down on the dry sand to guard their footgear, and Nate walked out to stand beside Brad.

Brad's first visible reaction was to look down. Nate flexed his toes and rocked on his heels, enjoying the cold wet squish of the sand underfoot. When Brad looked up, Nate met his eyes. There wasn't much light, and he wouldn't have expected to be able to read anything important in Brad's eyes if there had been. It was just the meeting that mattered, now.

"We have to talk," Nate said, just loudly enough to be heard over the waves. "Heat-shack rules: no ranks, just you and me. No telling the LT what he wants to hear or trying to spare me anything."

"No trying to take it all on yourself and spare the enlisted man," Brad volleyed back.

Nate pressed his lips together against the immediate temptation to argue that that was different, and Brad raised his eyebrows, lips turning up slightly. 

"Agreed," Nate allowed.

Brad glanced over his shoulder at Bo. "Heat-shack rules aren't much good without a heat-shack to keep us quarantined."

Nate didn't even look at Bo, only gave her the sense of squeezing a trigger, of _now_. The world suddenly seemed to contract; all the pack he had was here on this beach, Brad and Frost and Bo, and Brad remained as closed to him as ever. 

Fifty meters away Frost abruptly turned and swam to shore; Nate watched Brad silently reassure him, and Frost kept his distance. 

Brad's attention returned to Nate when the first shock of isolation passed. He studied Nate for a few seconds while Nate looked back, and then he said with firm deliberation, "Encino Man fucked us, Nate. He fucked both of us. Hard. And he fucked the whole fucking platoon right through us, and Godfather and Sixta just passed him more lube so he could keep fucking away without getting too chafed."

Nate kept a cool expression while Brad went through his little tirade; he was perfectly well aware that this was a test. He let the silence stretch for a few seconds after Brad stopped, and then Nate nodded. 

"We have been comprehensively fucked by our chain of command," Nate agreed. "The question now is whether we keep carrying whatever they knocked us up with, or abort this mess right now."

Brad jerked back slightly, eyes widening a little, and it was Nate's turn to raise his eyebrows. He didn't know what the hell else Brad had thought Nate wanted to talk to him about. 

"Heat-shack rules, Brad. If we think the risk to men or wolves is too great to proceed, it's up to us to stop this."

"Exclusion lists, you mean," Brad said, looking away to the ocean again. "That's--we had our shot at that, at our debriefings. We didn't."

"Are you going to try to tell me you were given an honest fucking choice about whether to go on serving with us?" Nate was closer to laughing than anything else, but he kept his voice steady. "It's allowed, if you want--you can add anybody you've ever been in the heat-shack with at any time it becomes imperative that you not serve with or under them. We could have excluded each other last week. We have a right. We have an obligation, if we think it's going to go really wrong."

" _Nate_ ," Brad said, making it sound remarkably like _sir_ , "any time an officer tells me I have a right to do something I know I also have a right to be fucking blacklisted if I exercise that right. We both have that right."

"Does your career matter more than--"

"My career will be fine," Brad interrupted sharply. Nate was more startled by it than he should have been, and clamped down on his instinctive sense of affront. 

"I'm talking about yours," Brad went on. "You and Bo have got a long career in front of you, and probably not that much of it in recon, the way officers get moved around. As much as we like you here, and as much as Godfather might understand deep down, all anybody else is going to know about you is that you're the bitch platoon commander who got fucked by his own TL and then pussied out and made some belated exclusion list demand to get rid of him. You have to think long term."

Nate took a breath in and out and then said firmly, "No, I don't. I'm a platoon commander. I have to think about my platoon, and about getting my platoon through this deployment without compromising their effectiveness or unnecessarily endangering them. Nothing else matters more than that, and I'd be a sad excuse for an officer if I put my career ahead of my men."

"Bo--"

"Bo cares even less about the long-term than I do," Nate ruthlessly interrupted right back. "If we wind up in some shithole assignment after this, that's what happens. After two excellent commands we're probably due for it anyway. But I will not pointlessly endanger my men and wolves, Brad, and if my sister goes fucking feral in a war zone--"

Nate cut himself off. Brad took a step away and turned to look up the beach, past Nate, toward Frost. Nate studied his face, wondering how it felt inside that calm, what was behind the layer of ice, wondering how everything they'd done in accordance with orders had wound up here, on the brink of this choice of little mutinies.

"She's close to it, Brad," Nate said, looking down at his feet to keep from looking back at Bo. "She thinks the fact that Schwetje left you in the platoon when I was so convinced he would take you away means we _won_ , that he and Yellowjacket showed us their throats."

In his peripheral vision he saw the shock of that go through Brad; he froze and didn't look at Nate. 

"Godfather and Capo set her straight, but what's going to happen in a war zone? What's going to happen when command isn't over our shoulder and we're in the field with you? Everybody tells us that wolves gravitate toward the Old Ways under pressure, that it's up to us to maintain discipline, but she's already a tail-twitch away from declaring that Frost is her mate and setting herself up as the queen-wolf of Bravo Two."

"Of Bravo Company," Brad corrected dispassionately, after a short silence. "There's no firebreak. If she goes feral and raises her own flag, there's not a wolf in the company with a more compelling loyalty. Neither of our sister platoons' commanders can keep their wolves against her, and Old Yeller's not going to hold the line."

"And depending on how blatant the defection is and how much our company commander freaks out over it, the battalion sics Alpha Company and Athena on us, because she _will_ hold the line," Nate said grimly. "And it's not some tidy heat-shack dart shit. Wolves get hurt, men get hurt, and you and I and our wolves get arrested just to restore order, which will be a lost fucking cause at that point. And all that in a fucking war zone, where she's most likely to try to take charge at the worst possible moment."

Brad turned to face Nate directly, putting his face into the light. "So that's it. Exclusion lists, we never see each other again, and the platoon is fucked anyway because there's no way you're going to get Kocher or anybody a tenth that good as a replacement TL when you've just publicly humiliated your CO by making an out-of-order exclusion request to fix his fucking colossal mistake."

It was Nate's turn to move away. Staring out at the ocean, trying to fathom how bad things could get, he said, "If we think it's actually going to come to that. If we think we can't control--"

"Nate, it's going to come down to you and Bo. She's the alpha here. She's the one who chooses, and you're the only person she might actually listen to before she does it."

Nate closed his eyes. That was indisputably true; Bo had certainly shown she was fully capable of rejecting a mate she _didn't_ want. If she decided on Frost, there wasn't going to be a hell of a lot for Frost or Brad to do about it if they were still in Bravo Two.

"So the question is whether we think I can do that," Nate said to the dark and the waves and the stars. All he got back was that he didn't know. He didn't know how bad it might get, how hard Bo might fight him on this, how strongly she would be tempted in whatever circumstances they might face. He didn't know if he would be enough, when push came to shove. 

"No question," Brad said, stepping up next to him again, standing at his side, shoulder to shoulder. "You will do it if it kills you, Nate. So the question is whether we're both willing to throw you on top of that grenade."

It was Nate's turn to freeze. Brad taking unilateral action, putting Nate on his exclusion list without Nate doing likewise, would look vastly worse. It would fall much harder on Brad and his career, and if Brad put his mind to it there was no way Nate could stop him from doing it. 

"You have no right--"

"But I do have a right," Brad drawled. "You've just been telling me I have the right--"

"Fuck you," Nate snapped, and then choked on the rich field of possibilities for replies.

Brad didn't say anything; he hardly had to. He shifted his weight and Nate shifted his, feeling every ache and throb and stab of everywhere and every way he'd already been fucked. Every way they'd both already been fucked.

"If I think it's going to kill you," Brad said quietly. "I have a responsibility to sacrifice myself for you. Even if it sinks my career, I won't get hurt. Fuck, I'll be safer than anyone; I put you on my exclusion list now and I'm probably off to South Korea until I give up and retire."

"You don't have any right to put me before the platoon," Nate insisted. "Maybe you rate yourself below me, but you can't rate me above twenty-two men and wolves, and you can't tell me they'll be just as likely to come out of Iraq alive without you as they are with you."

Brad looked down the beach again, and Nate followed his gaze this time. Frost was in the water again, a white shape reflecting moonlight between dark waves. Nate realized there was a human there as well, swimming in the deeper darkness near the pier. "Who--"

"Just some idiot," Brad said wearily. "He plays lifeguard a lot."

And that, Nate thought, made half his point for him. 

"If you believe that I can keep Bo from going totally out of line, then I need you in Bravo Two," Nate said quietly, still watching Frost. "You heard about the president's announcement? It's going to be soon, but it's not right now or we wouldn't be standing around here. We might get there when Bo's too heavily pregnant to be in the field. She'll probably wind up giving birth over there, and that might mean she loses the pups as soon as they're born. There's no way that goes down that leaves her at one hundred percent, and worst case--"

Nate stared into the ocean and blanked his mind of everything those words called up. They were just words.

"I could be in the field without her," Nate said quietly. "Or the platoon could be in the field without either of us. And if anything like that is going on, if she's even just not at the top of her game, I am going to need you and Frost helping to lead the platoon. You're right; if you were reassigned now I wouldn't get anyone I could remotely trust to replace you."

They stood there in silence for a while, and then Brad said, "So if Bravo Two is going to completely self-destruct, it's going to be a bang, not a whimper."

"Bravo Two isn't going to self-destruct," Nate said, finding that belief somewhere between himself and Brad and holding on tight. "We're not going to let it."

Brad let out his breath in a wolfish huff. "Aye aye, sir." 

Nate smiled grimly at Brad's pointed deference and shifted his weight, starting to turn away.

"No," Brad said sharply, instantly contradicting any impression of submission he might have given. "Nate, we're not done here."

Nate met Brad's eyes with a frown. "Are we doing this or not?"

"We are," Brad said, quietly certain. "But we can't afford to be blindsided by anything, and you haven't told me whether you actually want me to stay."

"I just got done telling you--"

"Why you need me to stay," Brad put in firmly. "And why the platoon needs me to stay. I get that, Nate, and that's why we're doing this. But it's not just Bo who...."

Brad trailed off and looked away, his whole body rigid in a way that belied the uncertainty of his failing voice. He was as closed off from Nate as ever, but Nate finally understood what Brad was getting at, what he was asking in as guarded a way as he could. Nate felt instantly guilty at forcing Brad to ask; he should have thought of this, should have somehow prepared for this part of it. This was a logistical question, too, after all.

"I don't know," Nate said, conscious suddenly of the closeness of Brad's bare arm beside his own, of how alone they were on the quiet beach in the dark. Mike had warned him not to do anything stupid, and Nate still hadn't really considered this. "I haven't had time to think, I don't have any fucking clue what I--" Nate had to force the last word out, "--want."

"Time to figure it out, then," Brad said, which was inarguably true. They needed to know and they needed to know _now_ , because they weren't going to get another chance to talk about any of this in private. Brad's voice was level as he went on. "Here, I'll make it easy."

Brad turned, coming around to face Nate and stepping in close, putting his hand on Nate's arm right between his elbow and the bandage, his thumb resting on the gauze. He didn't touch Nate anywhere else, holding a couple of inches distance even as he bent his head and tilted his mouth toward Nate's. He had his eyes open, and he stayed just far enough away for them to focus on each other. 

Brad waited.

Nate looked him in the eye and realized this wasn't just a test or a question; it was a confession. This was why--at least part of why--Brad had been so thoroughly closed off since they'd left the heat-shack. Brad wanted to stay, not just for the platoon, but for Nate. 

Nate breathed in and out; even with merely human senses, even with the salt smell of the ocean overwhelming everything, he could smell Brad in his space. He knew that smell, now. He was conscious of every inch of Brad's body, poised carefully away from his own, the same way he had held back at first in the heat-shack, waiting for Nate to agree. He wouldn't push this on Nate, wouldn't say out loud what he wanted or how he felt. He would allow Nate to deny it if he wanted to.

So this was the question: what did he want from Brad, with Brad? If Brad had been reassigned, if they'd decided they couldn't do this--Nate realized, belatedly, what Brad had been saying when he said, _So that's it, we never see each other again_. 

For a moment he couldn't even take in the concept of Brad being gone, out of the pack-sense and never to be seen again, and then he felt exactly what he'd felt in the heat-shack when he first saw Brad: a violent rejection that took up his whole body, his whole mind. _No_ , not acceptable, not possible, not survivable. 

Nate's eyes flashed open, and Nate rocked back slightly--because even before he knew what he wanted he knew he couldn't have it.

He saw Brad see it. Brad exhaled harshly against Nate's mouth, like he'd been gut-punched; his fingers tightened for an instant on Nate's arm. 

Nate shut his eyes, turning his face aside as he leaned in, pressing his cheek to Brad's. As if it mattered now, as if keeping their lips from touching would change any of this. "Fuck, Brad. Fuck."

"Sorry," Brad said, letting go of Nate's arm to put an arm around him, and Nate squeezed his eyes shut tighter and put both arms around Brad, holding on fiercely. Nate shifted, tucking his face against Brad's throat and then against his shoulder. He felt Brad doing the same. He could feel the warmth of Brad's breath through his t-shirt, both of Brad's hands splayed over his ribs, fingertips digging in. It hurt--Nate was covered in bruises and Brad was pressed against every one of them--but it didn't matter, not next to the thought of losing Brad, losing this.

He was going to, though. Sooner or later they had to break apart, step back from this and walk away. They couldn't hide in heat-shack rules forever, and Nate couldn't ask Bo to keep her distance from Frost without keeping his own distance from Brad. He was going to have to know this--know what he wanted, and what Brad wanted--and carry on like none of it was happening.

"We have to," Nate said, and on the first try his voice came out as a blurred mumble against Brad's shoulder. He took one more breath in and out, imprinting this moment on his mind, and then he lifted his head and said quietly, "Sergeant."

Brad's arms tightened one last desperate time, and then Brad said, "Sir," and they let go simultaneously, taking a few unsteady steps apart. 

Bo was at Nate's side, pressing up against his thigh, pushing nothing but anxious sympathy through the bond. Nate looked over and saw that Brad had dropped to his knees and had his arms around Frost's neck.

Brad looked up a second later, and Nate said, "This is going to sting a little."

Brad snorted and nodded. "I'm glad I--I'm glad it was me, Nate. I'm glad I'm staying. No matter how bad it gets, I want to be here."

"I want you here," Nate agreed, looking away and then irresistibly back. The words were too small for what he wanted; he still didn't know what the hell he wanted, only that it was vaster than those words, far more than any words he would dare to say out loud. He remembered--he still felt, in the throbbing of his bruises--Brad's grip on him and knew Brad was with him in that.

Bo whined softly, and when Nate looked down she was looking at Brad--or at Frost. Nate didn't stop to think before he said, "Do you think it's them, making us feel like this?"

Brad didn't say anything right away and Nate looked up when he realized how that had sounded, like he was trying to disavow this or find a way to escape it. But Brad was looking down at Frost, frowning slightly. When he did look up at Nate he shrugged. "Doesn't change anything if it is, does it? They're not going anywhere."

Nate pressed Bo's head against his hip, and Bo shifted her weight to support him better. "No. It's real either way. Philosophical question, I guess."

Brad cracked a smile at that. "I'll leave it to you, then."

Nate couldn't help smiling back; he knew that Brad was remembering that Nate had spent one entire fuck on the _Peleliu_ trying to explain Plato's Forms and the whole thought experiment of the shadows on a cave wall while Brad made deliberately obtuse objections. "I'll write a book about it someday."

"I won't read it," Brad promised.

Nate wanted to say, _You won't have to, I'll explain it to you_ , but that was where the bubble burst. Whenever someday came, he probably wouldn't have a chance to tell Brad about anything. Even if they did make it through this deployment unscathed, the natural shuffle of assignments would separate them within another year. Maybe this would wear off, if they didn't see each other again; maybe they'd keep getting thrown together in the heat-shack so they could pile more reunions and separations onto this. Maybe they'd build up enough callus not to feel this anymore. Maybe it would always feel just like this, like the most necessary thing in the world was the most impossible. 

"We have to," Nate said, and stopped. Brad knew what they had to do. 

"We have to be careful," Brad agreed. "We can't look like a mated pair any more than the wolves can. And this is going to get into the pack-sense one way or another, because we're too close or too distant or too careful. Recon's full of fucking incurable romantics."

"They'll all be watching for it." Nate looked down at Bo, who was still staring unabashedly at Frost. He couldn't imagine how either of them were going to fool anyone. "It might help that I'm--"

Nate didn't get the whole sentence out; he felt it catch in his throat like a splintered bone, and he knew that he went pale as he looked up at Brad. Brad jumped to his feet, reaching for him, but Nate shook his head and took another step back. Bo stayed with him, and when Frost came to his other side to lend another shoulder Nate didn't push him away, dripping wet and sandy as he was. 

_It might help that I'm dating Jill,_ he'd almost said. As though his relationship with her was a deception, or was primarily useful as such. 

Nate looked up at Brad, who seemed horribly alone without Frost at his side. Nate kneed the wolf gently away, and Frost moved back to Brad, leaning against him as if he needed propping up as badly as Nate did. 

"I have to break up with her," Nate said, and his heart was sinking even as he realized that this decision had been creeping up on him for hours. It was almost a relief to know he had no choice. "I can't--if that's how I'm thinking, I have to."

"It's going to look bad," Brad said, not disagreeing. "It's going to look like you're doing it for me."

Nate vented a short, miserable laugh. As if he could have Brad that easily. "I'm doing it for her. She doesn't deserve this."

"Neither do you," Brad pointed out, and Nate felt shamefully but undeniably warmed by that support. 

Nate held his gaze, wondering what to say. Nothing would be enough. Anything would be too much. Finally he nodded, turned on his heel and walked away.

Nate made it back to the truck before he realized he was still barefoot. He looked around and realized Bo was carrying his shoes by their laces with the socks stuffed inside. At the same time he realized that he was still so closed off that he couldn't even hear what she was doubtless saying to him about walking barefoot in a parking lot. 

He took his shoes from her and then opened the door, letting her jump in and scramble across to her seat. He threw his shoes in the back, too exhausted to contemplate the ordeal of putting them on, and then climbed into his own seat. 

It was very quiet in the truck; he was about as alone as he'd ever been since he'd entered the Corps, unable for the moment to hear even his sister's voice. Bo leaned across from her seat and lay her head carefully against his thigh, just above the bandage. Nate looked down at her, and at his injured thigh--throbbing badly now from all the standing--and he knew that he had to get himself squared away. 

Everything he felt about Brad--everything he felt about all of this--he just had to seal it up, bandage over it, and move on. There would be time later to look at it, to see how it scarred or show it to a doctor if it didn't heal. For now he had to stop the bleeding and get back to work. 

There was a trick to keeping a thought private in the pack-sense; in a way Nate was doing it to his whole mind right now. He would have to work at this one, but he could start here. He could push it down enough to be safe outside of Bo's shielding. 

When he thought he had himself under sufficient control, he reached over and put his hand on Bo's head and said out loud, "Open us back up. We need the pack, now."

They were there between one breath and the next, the warm breathing presence of his men, Mike closest of all. Nate still held himself apart with an effort, but he found himself breathing easier, sitting up straighter. With the platoon right there it was easier to remember what he was doing this for--harder to imagine letting them down. 

Mike pushed a wordless, wary question at him. 

_No change_ , Nate told him, forcing himself to articulate the words clearly. He had to resist the temptation to let even Mike just read what he was feeling. Not tonight. _Brad and Frost stay. We're going to make this work. My New Year's resolution is going to be not getting court martialed._

 _Good fucking luck_ , Mike replied, but it felt like an actual wish and not an expression of despair. Nate would take what he could get right now.

 _Thanks. Merry Christmas_.

Mike's last reply was just a push of something like resigned amusement, and then Nate's sense of him receded into his awareness of the rest of the platoon. Nate got his keys out, started the truck, and then sat back again, eyeing the clock. It wasn't nearly as late as it felt; it was still a decent hour to make a phone call, or a visit, and he knew he couldn't put this off.

* * *

In the parking lot outside Jill's apartment, Nate considered putting his shoes on. He gave up before he even tried. Bo, curled up in the passenger seat, stayed resolutely motionless when Nate opened the door, and Nate just nodded and left the truck unlocked in case she wanted to leave. He practiced not limping on the way to Jill's door. He could have let himself in, but he stopped and rang the bell.

Jill opened the door within a minute, and immediately stepped across the threshold to hug him; Nate could feel her being careful not to squeeze too tightly, but he still winced at the pressure of her chest against his, right on the worst of his bruises.

"Nate," she said, "come--wait, where's Bo? Is she okay?"

Nate couldn't help smiling at that; Jill did know what was important. "Yeah, she's fine, she's down in the truck. She didn't want to come up."

Jill's look turned more pensive, and Nate's smile fell away. "So you can't stay, then."

Nate shook his head. "I just--I need to talk to you. I should tell you what happened. What's been going on."

Jill nodded, backing up to let Nate in, and Nate turned and locked the door behind him, taking a few seconds to steel himself. Even as he turned to follow her into the living room he was mapping out the line of least resistance through this conversation. 

Jill sat down on one end of the couch, and Nate lowered himself carefully onto the nearest chair. She drew her feet up, hugging her knees, and only then did she notice Nate's bare feet; her eyes came up to Nate's, and he saw her want to ask and then decide not to. His heart twisted at that little evidence of patience, and at the same time he knew he could never have asked her to spend--another year? The rest of her life?--just biting her tongue and giving him space, any more than he could have gone on always having to explain and never really getting through. 

He focused for a breath on the pack-sense: Bo down in the truck and guys and wolves scattered all over Oceanside and greater San Diego, no one of them more distinct than another. 

"I told you something went wrong. But to explain what it was I have to tell you about some things that I thought it was okay not to tell you, up until now. Not that they weren't important, but I've never told you that much about breedings."

Jill nodded, shifting one arm to hide her mouth, though her eyes stayed riveted on him, so full of concern at Nate had to look away. 

"Bo doesn't like strangers," Nate said to his knees. "The first time she was supposed to be bred, two years ago, she rejected every wolf they offered. It was supposed to be a multiple breeding, which is usually five wolves. When she started fighting off wolves they started pulling in alternates. She rejected eight wolves in a span of about three hours, and afterward I put all of them on what's called an exclusion list, to make sure Bo and I can never serve closely with any of them again. I don't honestly know if I'd recognize them, but Bo would, and...."

Nate looked up and Jill nodded. Nate forced himself not to try to describe or explain it any further. It didn't matter. None of this mattered. It was just a way to get where he was going.

"Last year Bo went into heat while we were in Afghanistan. This time it was supposed to be just one wolf, but it was another stranger, and Bo fought him off, too. But a Marine--a recon Marine--who we'd met while being transported to the ship for the breeding stepped in. Sergeant Brad Colbert."

Nate kept his eyes on her as he said the name, working not to put any special emphasis on it. He watched her worry change into surprised recognition, and after the first shock her expression grew still and closed. 

Nate nodded and looked away. He couldn't feel what she was feeling or hear what she was thinking. "That breeding was successful, and at the end of it I didn't put Brad and Frost on our exclusion list. I didn't believe there would be any harm in Bo and me seeing them again or serving with them. It was months later that Bo and I were moved to recon, and in August, when my platoon was being staffed, I was asked whether I would be willing to command Brad given our prior contact. I said yes."

Jill's cheeks were flushing, and Nate didn't know exactly what it meant, whether she was angry or surprised or feeling humiliated at the lies Nate had told her in silence, because he could.

"Have you--" her voice shook, and she turned her face away. "Have you been fucking him ever since? Is that what you're saying?"

"No," Nate said, because he was only going to tell her the truth. She wouldn't understand it and might not believe it, but he wouldn't lie to her. The truth would do the job. "But he's the one I was with at the birthday hunt, and I was with him in the heat-shack yesterday."

"Right, sorry, I said that wrong," Jill said, and the shake in her voice was solidifying toward anger. "Has he been fucking _you_ ever since?"

Nate shut his eyes. This was the easy way, he reminded himself. This meant it would all be over soon. "No. We haven't done anything like that."

"Except at the birthday hunt and in the heat-shack and why the fuck are you telling me this, then," Jill snapped, unfolding enough to smack down an open hand on the couch cushion beside her. "If it's just a wolf thing then it's not--why would you--what is this, Nate? Did you decide you like him better after all this time? What!"

"It's not supposed to happen like this," Nate said. It was an instinct, by now, to speak more slowly and calmly the more someone else was angry or accusatory. "We work too closely together for our wolves to be bred, normally. That's what went wrong, us being put together. When I left that message I thought we might have to resolve it by forcing the chain of command to separate us, so it wouldn't create problems down the line. But Brad and I talked tonight and we agreed that moving him would create bigger problems, and that we can--I can probably handle what comes of this and keep the platoon in order."

"What comes of it," she repeated. "So it's just--just going to happen, that's it. No discussion, that's just how it is."

"Not what you're thinking," Nate said, because he knew she was stuck on this; of everyone who would think he was breaking up with her for Brad, she would be first and most justified. "Brad and I can't have that kind of relationship. I'm an officer--I'm his CO. It would create all kinds of problems."

"Oh," Jill said, looking away. Nate watched her jaw work; she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, but he hadn't seen any tears. "Right, of course, it would undermine your authority if they knew you were giving it up to him voluntarily."

Nate's mouth dropped open, and he couldn't think what to say. She hadn't even said it cruelly--not intentionally so. She didn't even sound angry right then. She just didn't understand something she had no reason to understand, something that he had never troubled to explain to her, something that everyone believed--Nate's family, his remaining handful of civilian friends, every officer he met who'd never served with an officer bitch and some who had. People who didn't know better thought a bitch was a bitch, and a bitch got fucked and was subject to the wolves who fucked her. 

"No," Nate said quietly. "The reverse, actually. It would disrupt the company because Bo and I would have too much of an independent power base. We can't be involved with each other; we can't even appear to be involved with each other."

Nate looked down, swallowed, marshaled the words to say it without explaining or apologizing, and then looked up and met Jill's eyes. 

"I mentioned to Brad that it might be useful that I'm dating you. It could give me--us--some cover."

He watched the hurt in Jill's eyes hardening into anger, and knew he didn't have to say anything more. Jill stood up, and Nate automatically stood with her, eyes on her grimly furious face. He was thinking _shh, shh, shh, it's all right_ even as her fist went back, and he stood still as a target dummy until her fist connected with his cheek. His head snapped back--Jill had an arm on her--and pain exploded through his face, which had been previously mostly unmarked. He felt Bo let herself out of the car and run toward him, swift and silent and deadly.

 _It's all right, I'm fine, I'm safe_ , Nate insisted, knowing there was no use, knowing Bo would never let him back down from what he'd done here even if Jill relented. 

"Okay," Nate said, turning away and resisting the impulse to touch the place she'd hit. "I should go."

"You should," Jill agreed tightly.

Nate was nearly at the front door--Bo was outside, pacing and giving a subsonic growl--when Jill called his name. He stopped but didn't turn around, bowing his head and waiting.

"I heard what the president said today." She sounded shaky, and Nate knew that excess of adrenaline; he knew how it could turn on a dime from fury to something else. "Don't you fucking die over there and make me feel bad about hating you, you fucking liar."

"I'll do my best," Nate promised. He let himself out without looking back again, pulling the door quickly shut behind him.

Bo closed her teeth on his hand and led him by it all the way back to the truck, guiding him to walk on grass part of the way and then picking a careful path across the asphalt. She didn't say anything to him that could be put into words, just a smothering press of anxious, scolding love. She jumped up onto the driver's seat when he opened the door of the truck, and Nate leaned into her before he climbed up, wrapping his arms around her and hiding his face against her neck. She whined softly, licking him wherever she could reach, and Nate laughed raggedly as he pushed her off.

"You're right. I'll always have you."


	3. Kuwait, February-March 2003

Stepping out of the Humvee when they first reached Camp Matilda, Nate felt a wave of intense agoraphobic dread that he didn't understand at all. He stood still, fighting down the impulse to climb back into the vehicle and take cover, until he recognized that what he actually wanted was to be somewhere cool and dim and earth-smelling. _Den_.

He looked down at Bo, who was looking around thoughtfully, seeking to solve the problem despite the fear Nate now realized was hers. She was barely two weeks away from giving birth. She had scouted half a dozen acceptable locations back at Camp Commando, near Kuwait City, but Camp Matilda had nothing but tents and porta-johns and an expanse of sand ringed by a gravel road and a flimsy fence. 

"Nate?" Mike came around from the other side of the Humvee, and looked back and forth from Nate to Bo. "You two all right? You both just went dark."

Bo flicked her ears in a fine physical imitation of unconcern and trotted heavily away. She'd hidden her fear from the pack-sense before they could be aware of it, without _Nate_ being aware of it, and without dimming their perceptions of the platoon. 

She was getting really, really practiced at filtering out what she didn't want the pack to know. Nate didn't allow himself to waste her effort by wincing. He settled for reminding her, yet again, that she never needed to hide anything from _him_.

"We're fine," Nate said aloud. "She's just getting close."

Mike would know that was a lie--two weeks was nearly a quarter of a bitch's gestational period--but he just nodded and led off for the tents. Nate followed his lead smoothly enough to seem almost like he wasn't following at all.

* * *

Nate and Mike were being housed separately from the men: Nate in a tent full of junior officers, and Mike with the other senior NCOs. Each of them dropped his gear and let his sister sniff out and scent-mark their share of the space; Bo did so with a drumbeat of _not safe enough, not safe enough_ occupying her thoughts, though she showed nothing but usual territoriality to anyone but Nate. When that was done, they went together to the barracks tent the men of Bravo Two and Bravo Three were sharing.

Captain McGraw was already there, lecturing his men--both out loud and through the pack-sense, so forcefully that Nate couldn't help but feel it even through their lateral connection--on how to lay out their half of the space and dictating who should sleep where. The men were moving their gear and the boxes of supplies being stored in the tent with long-suffering expressions. McGraw's brother, Banner, prowled through the Bravo Three wolves, snapping and shoving as he went. 

On Bravo Two's side of the tent, the men were shifting all the boxes of supplies to the center of the tent, moving in well-rehearsed unison while the wolves sat in the available open space, each near his brother's gear. By the time Nate had taken in the scene, Brad, Tony, Pappy, and Lovell had detached themselves from the work, their brothers all trotting up along with them to present themselves to Bo while the men carried on with their work.

Bo acknowledged the wolves in order, giving each a sniff and a lick--Frost, then Hurricane, then Blue, and Doom, most junior, last. She released each wolf as soon as she'd acknowledged him. Frost trotted off first and posted himself firmly at the boundary with Bravo Three's territory. Hurricane and Blue promptly followed. When she was done with Doom she moved into the tent herself, and Doom followed a pace behind.

Nate, meanwhile, exchanged nods with the men; salutes had been in abeyance since they'd reached Kuwait. "Everyone's settling in?"

"We've slept in worse places, sir," Tony volunteered, setting off an automatic flurry of agreement-memories. Lovell recalled a few blurred but unmistakable hours during SERE, while Pappy thought of a particularly awful Mountain Warfare course and Tony remembered a fighting hole in Afghanistan. Nate couldn't help recalling the particularly foul aftermath of a college house party, and Mike contributed a spectacularly uncomfortable couch in base married housing he'd been banished to in the month before his daughter was born. 

Brad broadcast nothing at all for a second, going absolutely blank, and then threw down a recollection of a night on punishment at military school, cold and alone and wolfless.

Nate looked away from Brad, watching Tony and Pappy's eyes flick toward him. They all recognized that instant of careful control; they knew as well as Nate did--even if they didn't remember the particular reek of the _Peleliu_ 's heat-shack and the sensation of lying naked on top of bitch-pudding packets--what Brad had thought of first and viciously censored. Frost couldn't intercede for Brad in the pack-sense the way Bo could for herself and Nate, and Bo couldn't do it for them without making her partiality painfully obvious and defeating the entire purpose. Nate stepped away, diverting his own attention and everyone else's.

"Men," Nate said, raising his voice only slightly, giving a tug of _come here, form up_ through the pack-sense. The team leaders moved aside to let the men gather in front of Nate, and Nate let his eyes sweep over all of them impartially. His gaze rested no more heavily on Brad beckoning Trombley over with a wave of his hand than on Stafford and Christeson grinning and shoving at each other as they found their places.

Nate and Bo both projected a pointed silence that stilled all the men and wolves. The quiet left an unfortunate gap through which Captain McGraw's voice--cheerfully and incorrectly explaining the four-color theorem and how it applied to the optimal arrangement of bedrolls--briefly penetrated. Nate didn't allow any reaction to show on his face, holding his platoon's focus in the pack-sense and outside it. 

"This is our final staging area," he said, and didn't suppress a little smile at the instant eagerness that raced through the men at that idea. "We could get the order to move tonight, or we might wait out an entire deployment right here while Saddam and the UN flirt and pass notes. Barring a sudden outbreak of international decisiveness, you have an hour to familiarize yourselves with the camp before chow. Any questions?"

The pack-sense filled with the usual barrage of irrelevant and ridiculous questions while the men all stood straight-faced. Nate threw back an equally random array of answers-- _Yes, no, Tuesday, you should show that to Doc_ \--and released their attention. The team leaders all turned away first--Brad guiding Trombley with a hand on his shoulder--and the men dispersed back to their tasks. Nate eased back toward the door as Bo trotted over to him, but she--of course--had Ray on her heels.

Nate raised his eyebrows, projecting patient receptivity through the pack-sense. 

Ray said, "Sir, I'm not asking you to confirm or deny anything, but if you _did_ have secret orders about the invasion, you and Bo _would_ have to go dark like this, wouldn't you?"

Nate blinked, and his awareness of the pack-sense was suddenly overwhelmed with the presence of the men--all of them just slightly off-balance because the LT and his sister were suddenly so much further away than usual--all listening for an explanation. Plenty of them were furtively, fondly certain of what Nate and Bo were hiding, but none of them had failed to notice the separation and none of them liked it. 

"If we had to keep something secret we would have to maintain our distance, yes," Nate agreed, not bothering to raise his voice or to pretend that the entire platoon wasn't listening. "And while I can neither confirm nor deny the source of my sister's sudden desire for privacy, she is a desert-blooded wolf who's just realized she's going to have to give birth to her next litter in the desert."

Ray's eyebrows went up, as if Nate had not given him merely the requested reassurance but some actual piece of new intel. Nate could feel the rest of them turning that over, what it meant that Bo was back in the country she was built for on the verge of war and motherhood. None of them knew what to make of it--Nate hadn't the slightest idea what it would mean himself, and Bo rejected the whole notion that a desert she'd never seen before could matter that much--but it at least distracted them from being unnerved at Nate and Bo's silence. 

Nate would take what he could get. He nodded to Ray and headed out.

* * *

Nate couldn't sleep that night. He had nightmares when he tried, dozing off straight into visions of pups lost in shifting sand, blown away or suffocated in sandstorms. After a few repetitions of that, he understood that it wasn't only his dream, and Bo wasn't only anxious. The desert wasn't just in her blood; it was in the memories of her mother's mother and all the other generations before her who had passed down their understanding of how to keep pups safe through the pack-sense of litter after litter. She knew what she needed, and it wasn't anything standard-issue.

Nate got up and went to find her, still restlessly quartering the camp. He walked beside her, because there was no point telling her that there was no safe place. The pups would be in danger for as long as they stayed with her, born straight into shamal season at this spartan border camp. They would be taken from Bo and transferred south to a POG camp in Kuwait as soon as a foster mother could be found. In the perilous interim, if there was one, Nate and Bo would just have to protect the litter as best they could. Bo wasn't going to accept that answer until she was forced to, and Nate certainly wasn't going to press it--not when he could still feel grit under his nails from digging through killing drifts of sand for her pups.

They walked back and forth for about an hour, around the tents and beyond them. Nate was looking up at the crescent moon and the stars when Bo suddenly lay down and stopped. He dropped to his knees after her, but she wasn't defeated; she was satisfied. 

_Here_.

Nate looked around. They were southeast of the tents, which meant they should be downwind of them in a shamal, for whatever protection they might offer. They were also on the downwind side of a very slight rise, hardly noticeable from higher off the ground than Nate was now. But they were on bare sand, and even pitching a tent here wouldn't be safer than anywhere else.

Bo huffed and then got back to her feet and began to dig with her forepaws. 

"You're not serious," Nate said out loud, but of course she was. Of course that was the only way to make a safe den here. "Okay, I'll get a shovel, just stop. I'll do it."

Bo ignored him and kept digging, and Nate stood up and went to find a shovel. 

She'd made a visible hollow in the sand when Nate got back with an E-tool. He doubted it would be sufficient for the whole project, but he figured he could make enough of a trench to convince Bo it was safe to sleep a few hours. He took her digging as a starting point, and she moved to one side and continued as he cut into the sand and the heavier soil beneath along a neat, straight line. 

He was starting to make some progress--Bo had subsided, panting--when Nate felt an approach through the pack-sense. He stopped and got to his feet, but recognized Christeson and Dusty even as they came into view. 

"Mind some help?" Christeson asked waving his E-tool as Dusty came up to the edge of Bo's digging and bowed to her.

"Not at all," Nate replied, and glanced sideways at Bo, who was still lying down, fondly washing Dusty's face. "She call you?"

Christeson shook his head and took a spot to Nate's left, squaring an edge neatly as Nate started digging again. "Just--you both lit up all of a sudden. We knew it was about having the pups out here, like you said. It's going to take forever if you do it alone, isn't it?"

Bo nudged Dusty away, and he took the place where she'd been working, digging away with his paws. 

"I don't think that's going to be a problem," Nate said slowly. Bo apparently felt calm enough, now that they'd started this, to let him and herself back into contact with the platoon. Now that Nate thought to check on them, he could feel them responding the way Christeson had. The stirring of men and wolves rippled quietly through the pack-sense. 

Stafford and Scooby appeared next, which was no surprise; Stafford and Christeson weren't quite shieldmates, but they'd been trying it on for size since the birthday hunt. There was no way Christeson had gotten out of his bedroll without waking Stafford. Christeson and Dusty had come first, alone, because they were youngest and longest-standing in the platoon; they were least likely to be rejected as intruders by Bo, closest to being regarded as pups themselves. Once they'd been accepted, Stafford and Scooby were as close on their heels as they reasonably could be. 

Christeson shot Nate a slightly apologetic look, but Nate shook his head and smiled. It had been good strategy, proper pack-negotiation. Christeson belonged in recon, for all he still had to learn.

Nate felt several others spread out and regroup. He was watching for them when they approached--five men flanked by five wolves, with Lilley, Bravo Two's other longest-standing lance corporal, in the lead. Nate didn't have to see their faces, or get their scents from Bo, to know it was Team One Bravo. 

Trombley and Lucky wouldn't have heard Nate and Bo return to the pack-sense, and no one would have woken them for this strictly voluntary detail; Navi and Ray had to stay away, because Bo wasn't going to tolerate another bitch anywhere near her den.

Brad and Frost would stay as far away as they could. At that point it only made sense to divide by teams, and let all of One Alpha stay in bed.

Tony brought up the rear of the group, and all five men were carrying the heavy flashlights and larger shovels they'd gone to find. Nate's eyes were well enough adjusted to the moonlight to manage the digging now, but he knew that the deeper they went the more confusing the shadows would become. Nate stood up from the shallow trench and Lilley darted in to take his place. Hasser nudged Dusty out of the way, and Leon and Christopher took up a line six feet downwind from them and started roughing out the lines of the digging. 

"We'll have to roof it," Nate said, because apparently this was an actual construction project, not just an effort to appease Bo.

"Plywood, no sweat," Tony agreed. "Just have to keep it no more than six feet wide so a sheet reaches across. Longer, though. You'll want some space."

"We could be down there for a while," Nate agreed, speaking slowly as the reality of it filtered in.

It could really work. They could make the litter safe enough with Bo that they wouldn't be taken away immediately. She might be able to keep them at least through the first couple of weeks, the most blind and vulnerable period, and then be able to hand them off to a foster mother with something like equanimity. The less traumatically the pups were weaned, the more readily Bo would step into true command of her platoon afterward and the less help she would need controlling them. 

The less she and Nate had to lean on Brad and Frost, the safer they all were.

Nate looked over at Tony and offered a smile. "Better a few weeks in a hole than the pups going south the first day." 

Tony gave him a short smile back and gave him a measuring look, head to toe. "We'll do it right, sir."

Tony offered a mental image--a square-edged rectangular hole, ten feet by six and seven feet deep. Nate nodded, eyeing the ground and mentally adjusting the angle so that one narrow end faced southeast and the other northwest. When he pushed the plan to the men, they shifted around the cuts they'd started, gouging the correct outline into the sand. 

Nate checked in with Mike, who was already awake--along with the entire platoon, apparently--and had already told teams two and three to go back to sleep. Team One Alpha hadn't moved from their bedrolls, and if the whole platoon could feel Navi's anxious curiosity and Frost's longing to help, at least Brad and Ray were guarding themselves better. 

"If we're not done in an hour or so, we'll change out," Nate said, aloud and through the pack-sense at the same time. Bo accepted that as well as the men; Nate felt Pappy and Lovell's teams settle down for an hour's shuteye even as Christeson and Stafford and Tony's men picked up their pace, determined to finish without being relieved. They worked steadily and in concert, shovels rising and falling in rhythm. Nate stepped in before Hasser knew he needed a breather, and Tony spelled Christeson a few minutes later. 

The pack-sense held the men all in place like gears in a machine, while the wolves lay like cheerfully inert counterweights in a warm heap on the sand. Bo lay with Dusty and Fluffy curled around her, all the desert-coated wolves keeping close for warmth. Scooby and Baby bracketed them while Doom, Kanji, and Libo sat up, keeping watch. The desert night was cold, and whichever men were taking a few minutes' break from the digging work would shove their hands into the furry warmth of the wolves. 

Nate took his turn the same as the rest of them, always wading into the center to put his hands on Bo. Once, resting his hands on her belly, he felt the pups moving inside her and got a sudden jolt of awareness of them, not just as an obstacle to get through and past in the next few weeks, but as new little wolves coming into the world. He wanted to meet them, suddenly, and in the same breath he wanted to introduce them to Brad. Nate clamped down on the thought as it echoed back and forth between him and Bo; she wanted to see the pups, wanted to show them off to Frost. Once again he didn't know which of them had really started it, but it didn't matter. Nate had to set the example and keep it under control. 

Bo promised him that no one else had heard, and this time when he looked over at the men, reaching out lightly in the pack-sense, he found them all aware of Nate and Bo's sudden distance. Now, though, they were comfortably confident that it was about the pups, about Bo being a desert bitch and her instincts kicking in.

Nate turned his thoughts firmly to the digging as he got to his feet and went back to work.

They cut a step at the southeast end where the entrance would be left open, so that Bo wouldn't have to jump more than her own height up or down. Buckets appeared at some point, so they could fill them and haul the dirt out, and before Nate would have thought it possible, he was looking up to see the level of the ground. 

Bo jumped laboriously down into the pit, snapping her teeth to clear everyone else out. Nate crouched down beside her as she sniffed around the den, which smelled reassuringly of heavy, solid earth with a pleasant whiff of _pack_. Bo scrabbled at the dirt a little, rounding out a too-sharp corner and then pressing herself into it, grinding a comfortable space into existence with her hip and shoulder. Nate stood looking down at her for a moment, and then she looked up with a wolf-grin Nate read through the pack-sense more than he could see it.

Nate sighed and looked up. Most of the men were scraping away sand from either side of the hole; Tony was standing at one end holding a sheet of plywood balanced on its edge. He grinned when Nate looked up and met his eyes and said out loud, "You ready for this, sir?"

Nate nodded and then sat down with his back to what would be the back wall of the den, tucked in close to Bo. Bo deigned to lay her head on Nate's thigh, and Nate curled over her and closed his eyes, but only a little sand sifted down on top of them as the plywood was settled into place. Even as the second sheet was laid down, leaving only the barest line of sky visible from where Nate sat, there was the unnerving sound of dirt being piled back over the plywood. It would act as an insulator, keeping the den cooler in daytime, warmer at night, and better sealed against dust than the bare plywood could, but it still felt uncomfortably like being buried alive. Bo's hackles came up, and Nate rubbed behind her ears and waited it out.

When they were finished, there was a certain shuffling-feet hesitating sensation from the men up above. Nate squirmed out from under Bo and got up. He walked to the opening that remained and hauled himself up and out. The men stood near the opening, while the wolves had all retreated downwind. Now that it was finished, this was Bo's den in truth, and no one would intrude on it. 

Nate looked over the visible results of their work; the roof of the den had enough sand scattered across it to be mostly camouflaged, and the earth they'd moved was piled up in a miniature berm, standing wolf-high at the upwind end of the den and curving around it in a tapering horseshoe, petering out halfway down the long sides. The ground fell away somewhat in the couple of feet left open between the edge of the plywood and the end of the den hole, so that the opening appeared in a small slope rather than being a hole in flat ground.

"Well done," Nate said, looking around the men and pushing warmth through the pack-sense to back the simple words that were all he could think of right now. "Thank you. Now get back to your tent, all of you. You're supposed to be sleeping."

They all grinned, gathered up the E-tools and shovels and flashlights and buckets and headed off. Nate stood and watched until they were in among the tents, and then he climbed back down into the den and stretched out next to Bo on the fresh bedroll that had appeared sometime during the proceedings, along with a little pile of tattered magazines and hoarded snacks, which Nate had set aside to be appreciated in due course. He lay with his head toward the open end where he could see the stars, and Bo settled her head on his chest. They only had a few hours left to sleep, but there wouldn't be any more nightmares. The pups were going to be safe.

* * *

In the morning, Nate made it halfway from the den to the showers, with Bo trotting heavily at his side, before Schwetje intercepted them, frowning as he squinted toward the little berm that marked the den's location. Yellowjacket, at Schwetje's side, trotted toward it in a wide arc that didn't intrude on the territory Bo had claimed as hers.

"Hey, Nate," Schwetje said, without meeting Nate's eyes. Nate turned and looked toward the den with him rather than stand there staring at him while he looked away. Bo stayed calmly at Nate's side, utterly unconcerned by Yellowjacket's movements. Nate squinted to one side of the sun and tried not to see anything. 

"Those guys last night were all volunteers, right?"

"Yes, sir," Nate said promptly. "Men who didn't feel inclined to join in stayed in the barracks tent. Most of the platoon takes an interest in the pups, and several of the men who wished to do so participated in digging out a den."

"You need to be careful about how much the men take an interest, Nate," Schwetje said slowly.

Nate blinked a few times. "Yes, sir. Sergeant Colbert was not among the men who helped."

Schwetje nodded slowly, frowning, but not denying that that was what he'd meant. He finally looked at Nate and down at Bo. 

"Make sure you scrub your sister off in the shower this morning," he said, pointing to the places where darker dirty patches interrupted the brindle of Bo's coat. "The water might be cold, but it's no excuse to neglect the grooming standard. You should really be sleeping in the tent until she goes into labor. Maybe you could take some plastic down there to keep out the dirt."

"Yes, sir," Nate said, focusing his mind entirely on those words. Maybe they could take some plastic down to keep out the dirt. "We were just on our way to wash up."

Schwetje nodded sharply. "Don't let me keep you."

"Thank you, sir," Nate said, and turned on his heel, jogging away with Bo at his side.

* * *

Nate and Bo went back to sleeping in their assigned barracks tent as ordered. They returned to the den every day or two, and Bo killed three snakes sheltering there and alerted Nate to as many scorpions to kill for her. Nate cleaned out the dust that sifted in during the next few shamals and rigged some tent canvas to protect the opening. Bo continued to dig out the back corner. The den was flagged off so no one would drive a Humvee over it, but on foot every Marine in the camp avoided it automatically, following their brothers as the wolves steered clear of Bo's den.

They did PT daily, but after the first few days in camp Bo declined to join the platoon on runs. She still stayed close while the men were given classes on procedures and the battalion translator drilled them on useful phrases in Arabic. Meesh regularly greeted Bo with a torrent of Arabic neither she nor Nate understood, no matter how many times Nate explained that Bo had been born in the United States and only understood English. 

In their second week at Matilda, Bo stayed in the barracks tent more and more, allowing Nate to move through the camp without her. It felt strange; Nate watched everyone he passed clock the absence of a wolf walking in sync with him. Their eyes would hit his collar bars and his nametape and then drop automatically to check for a wolf at his side and then jump back to his nametape when they grasped that his sister wasn't with him, and why. 

One of the strangest things about being without Bo was that Nate ran into Captain Patterson and Athena one afternoon, just walking back from the latrines to his platoon's tent. Nate stopped short, startled. Bo avoided Athena assiduously, so Nate had very rarely seen Patterson outside of required briefings, where the officer-bitches all swallowed their territorial instincts and put up with each other.

"Nate," Patterson said with a smile, heading directly toward him.

Nate smiled back and closed the distance, giving Athena--a classic Arctic gray wolf with her coat clipped down nearly as short as Patterson's buzz cut--a respectful nod as he approached. In Bo's absence, Athena was perfectly willing to have Nate around; she stepped forward from Patterson's side to nose curiously at his hand before sitting down between the men.

Patterson gave Nate a long look, the scrutiny cut by a sympathetic half-smile. "How you holding up, Nate? Your sister's gotta be getting close."

"We're okay," Nate said. "We're probably going to move into the den in another day or two."

Patterson's smile widened. "She's getting a reputation for that thing. Spooky desert-wolf instincts."

Nate grinned. "I keep trying to tell people that we actually dug the damn thing and she just picked the spot, but it makes a better story if it was all her. Makes it sound like she and the other desert wolves will be able to win the war for us."

Patterson nodded, looking down at his own sister. "As long as nobody does the math on how many desert wolves the Iraqis have got."

"Maybe it won't come to that," Nate said. 

No one knew for sure, and the closer Bo got to giving birth the more Nate hoped that this might still all blow over, that she wouldn't have to lose the pups after a few days or a few weeks, and their men and wolves would all stay safe on this side of the border. Recognizing it as a transference of maternal instinct didn't actually make Nate stop feeling that way; he and Bo had gotten up twice last night to walk to the platoon's tent, check in with the men on fire watch, and head-count everyone inside through the pack-sense, and it wasn't only because Bo had to pee. 

Patterson set a hand on his own sister's head and nodded understanding. Nate tried to imagine having this fierce feeling of protectiveness for an entire company, and shut down the line of thought before it went too far. It was what Bo wanted, and it would be a good problem to have, someday, but he couldn't fathom it now. He didn't know how Patterson did it. Now wasn't the time to ask, not with Bo waiting for him, her pups and the war all teetering on the edge of arrival.

Patterson gave Nate a grim smile. "We can hope."

* * *

On their tenth night at Matilda, after Bo and Nate left the tent so she could take a piss, Bo set off for the den. Nate followed and helped her down and inside. Nate sat on the step, stretching his legs and half-sleeping sitting up while Bo paced. It struck him, after a while, that she wasn't digging anymore, just moving around and around the den. Then he realized that the faint, ominous cramping in his guts wasn't coming from him. 

_Heads up_ , Nate sent to Mike and to Doc Brunny, nudging them both sharply through the pack-sense to wake them. _Here we go_.

* * *

Doc Brunny, the veterinary corpsman, pinged Nate from just outside after he'd been sitting and watching Bo pace for a few hours, and Nate pushed the tent canvas back to let Brunny in. He had a tarp and some labeled biohazard bags, which he passed to Nate before turning back for a water can and a crate of rations. 

"Shamal in the forecast," Brunny explained, and Nate realized he knew that--yesterday's weather briefing had gone straight out of his head. 

Brunny grinned. "Don't sweat it, sir. You've got other things to think about."

Nate nodded back, smiling as best he could, and tugged the tent canvas back into place. Brunny turned on a flashlight, plenty to illuminate the small space, and they sat side by side for a while watching Bo, who was still pacing restlessly. 

"She did fine with her last litter, didn't she?" Brunny said after a while. "That was her first, and she had six."

Nate nodded. "All born alive, no complications."

"Second labor's usually easier," Brunny said carefully. Nate could feel through the pack-sense that he was easing up to _something_. 

"I am aware," Nate said dryly. "What is it, Doc?"

Brunny flashed a short smile in Nate's direction and looked back toward Bo. "Sir, you're both held really fucking tight in the pack-sense right now. I think it's worrying you, and it's definitely worrying her. Littering is scary at the best of times and this isn't the best, but she's still trying to keep you both closed off like you have been since Christmas. She's trying to go it alone."

Nate swallowed the impulse to tell the truth, in the dim, close, ultimately illusory privacy of the den. Not since Christmas--since the heat-shack. But he couldn't say that for the same reason that no one in the platoon ever said that. Everyone knew why. No one said it, and Nate couldn't say it now, not to Brunny and not to the entire platoon--the entire battalion--who shared the pack-sense with them.

It didn't matter, anyway. Brunny was telling the truth. When Bo had given birth to her first litter aboard the _Dubuque_ she'd been nervous, but she'd also been firmly grounded in her pack. Every Marine bitch on board had been with her in the pack-sense, and even though Bo wouldn't have let them anywhere near Nate's stateroom, she had welcomed their support from a distance. It had made a difference; it had made the whole thing easier. 

Nothing was the same now, and nothing about this was going to be easy. They were waiting to launch a war, rather than coming home from one. They'd traded ocean for desert, a sunny stateroom for a hole in the ground. For a second Nate remembered the waxy smell of the surfboards Bo had denned under; Bo lifted her head and looked at him. Nate slid down off the step onto his knees, and Bo came over to him, pressing her head into his chest. Nate curled down over her, hiding his face against her fur, and then he made himself do what he'd been working so hard to avoid for the last couple of months.

Nate opened himself up to the pack-sense, unfolding from the tight control he'd been holding on to for so long that it felt almost normal. The pack was there, waiting for him--waiting for Bo, who followed his lead almost faster than he gave it, letting herself loose among the wolves in a way that she should have been all along, if Nate hadn't had to ask her to have such human control over herself. 

Nate felt his shoulders slump as he sighed, feeling the platoon around them in the pack-sense, the fond interest they all took in the pups. Ash and Navi were most prominent, sharing their own memories of littering--years ago for Ash, just a month for Navi, who had left two-week-old pups behind at Pendleton. The bitches in their sister platoons, Patterson's Athena and a ghostly sense of Godfather's lost sister--even General Mattis's sister Prima lent support to Bo. She pulled away from Nate after a moment and nodded toward the back corner of the den, where she'd hollowed out a space she liked. 

_There_. 

Nate reached for the tarp Brunny had brought and laid it down, and Bo collapsed onto it, ready now for the real work.

* * *

Bo wouldn't let anyone but Nate touch her. Brunny stayed perched on the step near the entrance while Nate knelt beside Bo, murmuring encouragement out loud or through the bond, wherever it seemed to belong. The first pup arrived near dawn, and they fell into a rhythm after that, Nate and Bo catching a little sleep while an increasing number of pups nursed or dozed against Bo's belly, curled up close to the rest of the litter still inside.

The second pup was a bitch. The shamal arrived shortly after she did--Brunny secured the tent canvas and told Nate not to worry about it, and Nate gave it barely more attention than Bo or the pups did. Compared to the shamals they'd spent in tents, this one was barely audible, and Nate was caught up in Bo's labor and the pups' first breaths and first squirmy steps. The sixth pup, born in midafternoon, was another bitch, which nearly made Brunny fall off the step when Nate called it out. 

Nate's startled delight gave way to an unease he could feel echoing through the pack-sense as the news spread through Nate and Bo's wide-open connection. Navi had thrown her first bitch in three litters last month, and everyone knew that more bitches were born at the start of a war than at any other time. There had been a bitch in nearly every litter at the start of World War II. Two bitches in a single litter was a sign of war for sure--a long war. A war the wolves thought would require increasing numbers of wolves to replace the ones going into battle. 

Bo made an irritated, anxious noise, giving him the same through the pack-sense. Nate shook off the implications and held out the newest pup, and Bo licked her clean and then nosed her toward her brothers and sister.

* * *

The last of the pups arrived around sundown. Nate felt like his whole body went limp when Bo's labor was finally, really over. He sacked out on the bloody, sticky tarp with all the pups, Bo's tail brushing his knees and his arm laid along her forelegs, the pups all between them, nursing or sleeping. Brunny pestered Nate and Bo into drinking some water, and then left in a roar of wind and flapping tent canvas. The shamal was still raging, but Nate could feel the bright sparks of Doc Bryan and Miller and Tiger all waiting with a guideline to get Brunny safely back to the barracks tent. 

It was just them in the den, after that: Nate and Bo and the litter. It felt cozy and safe while Nate and Bo dozed. 

A few hours later, as the storm raged on, it started to feel dark and claustrophobic. Bo and the pups weren't bothered--Bo still felt secure and absorbed in the pups--but Nate found himself standing up over and over to check that the opening to the den wasn't fully buried in sand. He made himself be still--there wasn't room for him to pace, not with all the pups underfoot. He ate an MRE and tossed one to Bo.

He went and sat close to her when they'd both finished eating. He gathered the pups into his lap and took a turn handling each of them. With the light brought down to the floor and set up beside him he could see their coats properly, and he checked them all again, marveling that Bo really had two daughters, now. The littler of the two, sixth-born, looked black in the low light, though Nate thought she would probably turn out to be seal-brown, the darkest shade of Bo's coat spread out into a pool of shadow. The other bitch was a miniature of Bo, with the same desert-brindled short coat and, judging by the way she attempted to bite Nate's fingers, probably the same officer-bitch temperament as well. The five dog pups were a mix of Bo's and Frost's coats, variously brindled or pale. One, who looked like he would grow into his father's full Arctic coat, had white paws and chest and was otherwise almost exactly the brown of the dirt walls of the den. 

"We've gotta keep an eye on you," Nate murmured. "You are perfectly camouflaged for your surroundings."

The pup snuggled contentedly into Nate's grip and made no attempt to get away, which did reduce the odds of totally misplacing him. Still, when Nate set him down he put him nearest to Bo's front leg, and she nosed at the pup anxiously before settling down.

Nate turned to checking on his men, via the pack-sense, just as he'd checked on each pup. One by one he reached out to them through the pack-sense, which was open and clear despite the raging storm that physically separated them. He didn't try to speak to them--unless they were paying very close attention, they wouldn't even be aware of his presence--but he confirmed for himself that every man was accounted for from Mike right down to Trombley. They were all bedded down except for the unlucky few on fire watch in the storm, and those weren't more than usually miserable. 

By the time he'd tagged his way through all the men, Nate had managed to trick himself into feeling no more trapped by the storm than they were, and no more alone. He leaned into the corner of the den's walls and dozed, half-waking over and over when the pups made a sound or the wind's howl changed key.

He woke with a start when the pups' little yips were suddenly loud, and realized that it wasn't that the litter had found their voices a few days earlier than expected. The wind had died, and there was no other sound to drown out the pups.

Nate stood up and then hesitated, looking over at Bo. She raised her head and gave him an indulgent look--she shared the memory with him of the last litter, the pups when they were just getting their legs under them and wanting to explore. Nate grinned at the comparison and accepted the mixture of permission and command. _Go_.

Nate grabbed his M4 and hauled himself up and out without waiting for anything more. The air outside was crisply cold, the sky dazzling with stars and a nearly-full moon. Nate stood for a moment just staring up, almost overwhelmed at the openness of the space around him, his sudden awareness of the camp all around him, hundreds of men and wolves huddled on the surface of the earth.

Some closer than others. There was no sense of surprise as Nate lowered his gaze and found Brad and Frost perched on top of the berm that sheltered the den, which had accreted enough sand during the last couple of weeks' shamals to be nearly a dune. They were facing away, keeping watch, their eyes on the rest of the camp and their backs to Nate and Bo and the pups, but they were as conscious of Nate as Nate was of them. 

It felt exactly right, every bit as normal and correct as standing in the open surrounded by the battalion. Of course Brad and Frost were here; of course they were keeping watch. Nate could feel how they wouldn't be anywhere else, just as Nate wouldn't have wanted to see anyone else when he stepped outside. He could feel Bo's alpha-mother satisfaction in having everyone here together, the pack within the pack within the pack. Bo and the pups and Frost, Brad and Nate, making up a perfect and complete unit--and beyond them the platoon, and beyond them the entire battalion, all connected.

Nate stumbled back a step, shutting himself away from the pack-sense as if he could undo the revelation contained in that unthinking moment of rightness; Bo followed suit with alacrity, turning all her attention firmly to her pups. 

It was done in an eyeblink. In the second Brad stood up and turned, Nate was already a mile away in the pack-sense. Even from his carefully correct distance Nate could feel that Brad had gotten himself under control. He could also see Brad's wide-eyed look of alarm. 

Brad gestured away toward the camp, and Nate shook his head and beckoned him down, taking a few steps toward him. They couldn't undo that moment of awareness, or the fact that it had taken place while they were all so unguarded, betraying them to the platoon, potentially to the entire battalion. They could only behave normally, and show that no matter what any of them might think or desire in their weaker moments, they were still professionals and still behaving as such. They'd known that their feelings about each other would get out sooner or later; whatever came of this, they would handle it.

Brad skidded down the near side of the berm, Frost on his heels. "Sir."

"Sergeant," Nate said, nodding, forcing the words to come evenly. He focused on Brad with an effort, not looking around and not jumping ahead to compose his defense. "Your team came through the shamal all right?"

"Trombley's got sand in places none of us want to hear about, but we got him pointed the right way eventually," Brad said, and offered Nate a discrete burst of memory, Team One Alpha pulling watch during the storm.

Nate smiled slightly and nodded. "Well-handled, team leader."

Nate accompanied the words with a press of approval through the pack-sense, the closest he dared come to telling Brad _I'm still glad you're here, I'm still glad it's you_.

Brad looked away, but Frost pushed closer to Nate, pleased to be praised. He sniffed curiously at Nate's thigh, and Nate said, "Getting a whiff of the pups?"

Nate wasn't sure if they had smells that could be differentiated yet--they were too young for scent-names, and even the actual smells of them had to be still a muddle of milk and Bo's licking. But Frost sniffed him up one leg and down the other before turning away, satisfied, to sit at Brad's side.

Brad looked up with an apologetic quirk to his mouth, and said, "He just wanted first dibs on them, I think, sir."

Nate nodded. No one had reacted to them; it was too much to hope that no one had noticed, but nothing was going to happen right now. They had to carry on. "Only fair. I just came out to catch my breath."

Brad took a step back, hearing the offer of a dismissal. "Sir."

Nate nodded, and Brad and Frost slipped away around the berm. Nate stood and watched the stars. He tried not to pay too much attention to their steady strides going away across the sand and knew that he was failing.

* * *

Bo was waiting for him just inside the den, up on the step. She'd left the pups down on the floor, and Nate had to stop and find a light before he could haul her back down to them, to be sure he didn't step on one of them who had come looking. They weren't yet distinct enough in the pack-sense for him to be sure of their locations. Only one had escaped the tarp in the corner--the white-pawed brown dog pup--and he'd only made it halfway across the den. Nate dragged Bo back down to the floor as she licked anxiously at his face and throat. He scooped up the straying pup as he settled on the floor under Bo's ministrations, laying the pup on his chest like a shield. Bo was only distracted for a few seconds, nosing at the pup, before she went back to worrying at Nate.

It took him a few minutes, under all of that, to realize that she'd closed the pack-sense around him as well, rendering his sense of the platoon soft-edged and fuzzy and distant. 

Nate pushed her away and shoved sharply through the pack-sense at the same time, reaching out privately for Mike, who was awake and confused but not particularly alarmed, and not apparently aware of what Bo had been doing, protecting Nate from the pack-sense. Nate pushed his memory of that unguarded moment with Brad toward Mike, and on its heels, _How bad did I just fuck that up?_

He felt Mike thinking it over, wary and carefully contained. Bo stepped off of Nate, going back to the rest of the litter and settling herself beside them. Nate rolled onto his side, dumping the last pup in among his brothers and sisters. He reached out cautiously into the pack-sense, and felt the pointed blankness of Brad, the warm sleeping obliviousness of most of the platoon, and the gossipy cheerfulness of Lovell's team, who were on fire-watch and had felt it directly, as it happened. They were rehashing it already; the rest of the platoon would wake up knowing.

There was nothing, yet, from up Nate's chain of command, and nothing stirring among his fellow platoon commanders. All the officers were still asleep. 

_Could have been worse_ , Mike finally offered. 

Nate could only accept that judgment. He turned his focus to Bo and the pups while he waited for morning, and whatever was coming next.

* * *

Schwetje didn't address Nate at all until Nate ventured out into the camp to check on his men and wolves. Nate was still wearing the fatigues he'd been in for the last two days, and he had just noticed exactly how much of the dirt he'd thought was ground into them was dried blood when Schwetje walked up to him and said out loud, "Hey, Nate."

Nate looked up, forcing himself to drop the frown of concentration and present a clear, calm face to his commanding officer. "Sir?"

Schwetje was now frowning down at Nate's uniform, and Yellowjacket leaned in to lick at Nate's trouser leg and then recoiled. Schwetje's mouth opened like he wanted to say something, and then the frown deepened and his mouth closed again. He finally dragged his eyes up to Nate's, and the frown eased into a look of earnest concern. Nate braced himself to defend his professionalism while covered in lupine afterbirth.

"Lieutenant, I know you've got a lot to deal with, with your sister having her litter here and the pups not going down to Camp Commando yet."

Nate kept his teeth gritted, and his projection into the pack-sense curled tight against the urge to burst out with self-defense. He hadn't been asked a question, and his CO was speaking. Slowly.

"If she's making things difficult for you with Frost and Sergeant Colbert... if you can't handle things how they are, Nate, we can make a change so you're not going into an invasion like this."

Nate lowered his gaze and hoped fiercely that it looked submissive and thoughtful and not like a desperate effort to keep his sister from hearing, and to suppress his own instinctive howling refusal. No one was taking Brad and Frost from them, not now. Nate and Bo would do whatever they had to, be as perfectly correct as anyone could ask them to be, but they were not giving up their team leaders. 

The pack-sense of the platoon was--apart from the perpetual lag of Trombley, and even that was comfortably familiar--as clear and tight as it had ever been. Bravo Two was ready for anything right now, fully prepared to step into war or respond to attack. They could drill in a shamal and keep order. Even knowing it was dangerous, knowing that this was how a unit could form into a true pack and go feral, Nate wouldn't relinquish his platoon's perfection, not when their lives and their mission-effectiveness depended on it. Not without a fight.

Yellowjacket stepped in again to sniff at him; Nate kept his hands open and breathed evenly.

He looked up and focused firmly on speaking the exact truth. "Sir, nothing has changed in the last two months. As we agreed in December, I am capable of commanding Sergeant Colbert. It would reflect badly on all of us if there were to be a sudden change of assignments."

"Right," Schwetje said, frowning again. "Yeah, it just seemed like you two... but if nothing's changed, then nothing's changed."

"Nothing," Nate said firmly, "has changed. Sir."

"Good," Schwetje agreed. "Good. You should really get some clean fatigues there, Nate."

"Yes, sir," Nate agreed. "As soon as I check on my platoon."

"Right," Schwetje agreed, and nodded a dismissal.

* * *

Nate managed to shower and change into clean fatigues without further incident. He was on the way to turn in his bloodied uniform to be washed when Doc Brunny caught up with him. Even as he approached Nate, he was pushing a guarded sense of apology through the pack-sense, the same quiet anxiousness that was already spreading through the platoon.

Nate shook his head as Brunny fell into step with him. "Not your fault, Doc. Bo needed the pack when the pups were born. I should have been more careful after that, and I wasn't. But there's no problem. Nothing's changed."

Brunny opened his mouth to say something, and Nate shook his head slightly, pushing it through the pack-sense. _There is no problem. Nothing has changed._

Brunny snapped his mouth shut, and Nate felt it propagating through the pack-sense, a wary silence falling over the whole idea of the LT and Colbert, of Bo and Frost. Nate nodded, and Brunny nodded back. 

"I'll come by a little later to have a look at the pups, sir."

Nate summoned up a smile. "You know where to find us."

* * *

Nate was eating breakfast, paying more attention to assuring Bo that he'd be back soon than on his surroundings, when Patterson sat down beside him. Nate automatically twitched away, but Athena settled under her brother's chair and politely refrained from leaving her scent too obviously on Nate.

"Nate," Patterson said, without particular emphasis. He was distant in the pack-sense, like he always had been, and Nate resisted the impulse to reach out, to try to find more. 

"Sir," he said quietly, returning to his breakfast and keeping his head down. 

Patterson knew, like everyone else in Camp Matilda knew, what Bo wanted with Frost, and what Nate wanted with Brad. Patterson understood what that meant, the way it could put the platoon beyond the reach of the chain of command. He was an officer-bitch's brother, and whether Athena had ever had a similar impulse or not, Patterson would know what it meant, and how it felt, better than anyone else Nate had spoken to. 

Patterson also had to know just as well as Nate did that if Nate fucked this all the way up--if Nate's platoon went feral--it would be Patterson and Athena who would be charged with restoring order.

Nate sat and ate with drill-perfect posture, hushing Bo through the pack-sense. The last thing he needed right now was for her to get it into her head that Athena and Patterson were a threat, because that would drive her straight into trying to claim total control of her pack.

"Nate," Patterson said again, when a few minutes had gone by. 

Nate looked over at him. He was still giving nothing away through the pack-sense, still just a distant, neutral sense projecting authority from up the chain. Nate had to read his expression as if he were wolfless, had to read _against_ the total calm that was all Patterson and Athena let into the pack-sense. For an instant it was like trying to sound out Arabic letters, remembering to read from right to left and counting dots; then he recognized the look of wry sympathy Patterson was giving him. 

Nate ventured a slight smile in return. Whatever happened next, whatever Patterson and Athena eventually had to do, Patterson really did understand this. That was something.

* * *

Nate knew, logically, that whatever was going to happen wasn't going to happen right away: not in camp, and not while he and Bo and Brad and Frost were all on their guard against it. Still, it was enough to keep him out of the den and with the platoon as much as he and Bo could bear. He slept there with her, cuddled up with the pups, and returned several times a day to play with the pups and let Bo fuss over him and scent-mark him as thoroughly as she could without actually pissing on him. 

It wasn't all for Bo's sake, either; after more than three years with his sister, he felt constantly off-balance without her, and more so now that they were seriously training for the invasion. He couldn't help sharing her constant low-level anxiety for the pups. There were rumors throughout the pack-sense of pups born at other camps that might have been--literally could be, for all Nate knew--taken from Bo's nightmares of pups lost or killed by the sand, by snakes and scorpions and feral desert wolves slipping into camps at night. No such casualties were reported through official channels, but that wouldn't stop the rumors, and it didn't relieve Nate of the compulsion to come back to the den as often as he could to see the pups for himself. 

He was down in the den with _blacksnake_ and _shamal coming_ asleep in his lap when something went suddenly wrong with the platoon. Bo whined, scrambling to her feet and dumping the rest of the pups into a wiggling, cheeping pile. Nate dropped his two with their siblings and scrambled up and out of the den as he tried to work out what it was. The wolves all had a sudden anxious sense of immediate danger barely held at bay. The men were all reacting to it, but the feeling came solely from the wolves, and solely from the wolves of Bravo Two, so it couldn't be any actual external threat.

 _Mike_ , Nate demanded, _what the hell?_

Mike came back feeling harried. _Brand new fucking superstition. Lucky's name is a jinx now._

Nate scrubbed a hand over his face and then dropped back into the den, leaving the flap open so there was light coming in behind him. Bo had already calmed down a little and was nosing over the pups when Nate said, "Lucky," out loud. 

Bo looked up at him like he'd just pissed on the floor. 

Nate pinched the bridge of his nose. _Get them settled, and then I want to talk to you and Brad._

 _Roger that_ , Mike agreed, and Nate didn't bother reaching out to repeat himself to Brad. His team was at the center of this; he'd have his hands full. Nate stayed where he was, sitting on the step and watching Bo with the pups, shielding his own thoughts and swallowing his frustration and self-recrimination. It didn't matter now whether he should have seen this coming, whether Bo could have prevented it by being with the platoon instead of her pups, or if he and Bo could have quashed it somehow if they were more open to the pack-sense. Now they'd gotten to this point and they had to deal with it.

Nate got up and climbed back out of the den when he felt Mike and Brad approaching. He straightened up, brushing himself off, just as they came around the berm. Their faces were equally set, but Nate could feel an argument crackling between them in the pack-sense; he shook his head before either of them said a word and looked back over his shoulder. _Bo_.

The pack-sense drew tight around them, cutting off this discussion from the rest of the platoon. Mike and Brad both looked unnerved, but Nate didn't really care right now what they thought of Bo's ability to keep secrets.

"What's going on here?" Nate focused on the discord between them, which was almost more unsettling than the incident itself. 

Brad shot a look to Mike, who gave him the floor with an upturned palm.

"We can turn this around, sir," Brad insisted immediately, earnest determination flooding off of him. "We _have_ to turn this around. Lucky's part of the platoon. He's Team One, and if we actually let every wolf in the platoon demand that every man in the platoon avoid saying his name, we're saying it's all right to think he's not one of us. We're putting him outside the pack."

Nate glanced toward Mike, who shook his head. 

"I'm not saying that's not true, Nate, but it doesn't matter. It's a done deal. Those two have always been outside the pack and we all know that. The wolves think what they think and we're not going to get anywhere by pissing them off or freaking them out--we're definitely not going to convince them to accept Lucky and Trombley. Not now, not with Bo away."

"Not that it matters very much at this point," Nate said, fixing his gaze on the horizon between Mike and Brad's shoulders, "but can anyone explain to me how this happened? What the hell was that, just now?"

"That was Darnold," Mike said grimly, "talking shit because he wishes he were still in second platoon."

"He said he was glad he wasn't riding with us, because having a wolf named Lucky was like having a living pack of Charms along," Brad added, his voice falling into precisely the same tones as Mike's. On this, they were in perfect unison. "Kocher dragged him out just about as soon as he said it, but the wolves got the idea. We can give them a new idea, though--we have to, sir, or they're going to fucking kill Lucky and Trombley out there the first time things get tense."

Nate let his eyes close, just for a few seconds, and opened them as he spoke. "No one's going to kill Trombley or Lucky. We're not going to let them. We're not going to let that happen."

Nate didn't put any special emphasis on the words with his voice or through the pack-sense, but he saw Brad's eyes widen a little anyway, remembering the last time they had stood alone together on the sand and decided what would happen next. 

"Sir, we can fix this now," Brad pressed, flicking a cautious sideways glance at Mike. 

Nate shook his head slowly. "Bo can't fix this, Brad. She's too anxious about the pups and too distracted from the platoon. She couldn't get them to like Lucky three months ago and she sure as hell can't do it now."

He watched Brad swallow words. Nate braced himself even as he jabbed at Brad in the pack-sense. "Spit it out, Sergeant."

"Frost can," Brad said tightly. "We can push this, we can bring the wolves around and get Trombley on the inside once and for all. This is why I'm here--"

" _No_ ," Nate snapped, at the same time Mike said sharply, " _Brad_ ," and no one had to find out if Brad would have said _sir_ or _Nate_.

"You're here because you got the same orders the rest of us did," Nate went on as Mike subsided. "You are not here to fucking assert my authority for me, Sergeant, and if I ever want you to do so you will know because I will have fucking ordered you to do it. The wolves have picked up a superstition; that is what wolves do under stress and we are going to work the fuck around it because that's what we are currently equipped to do. Bring Trombley and Lucky here, and I will explain the situation to them."

"I'll tell them, sir," Brad said, stiff-shouldered, voice clipped, forty degrees below zero in the pack-sense. Brad shifted his gaze from the horizon to meet Nate's eyes, and he added warily, "If I may."

Nate gave him a short nod, and Brad turned away, walking just to the berm and then stopping. 

_Bo, let him go_ , Nate pushed at his sister, and he felt the muffling of the pack-sense pull away reluctantly, returning them all to the full presence of the platoon. Brad set out again in confident motion as soon as he was released. Nate let a little of his frustration slip before he locked himself down again, and when he turned to look at Mike he found him looking back with an expression Nate couldn't read, through the pack-sense or outside it.

Nate ducked his head, scrubbing at his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Is he right? Am I going to get Trombley and--and his brother--killed trying not to blow this wide open before we even step off?"

"Nobody's going to let anything happen to Trombley," Mike said firmly. "You're doing what you have to do. You're keeping the peace."

Nate looked up and met Mike's gaze, unable to find words for the real question, the one that only time would answer anyway. _Did I do the right thing, did I have any right to make that call, is this the thing I fuck up that destroys everything_?

Mike's mouth twisted wryly. "I am fucked if I know, Nate."

* * *

By the time the pups were three weeks old they were all trying vigorously to follow Nate out of the den every time he left, and Bo decided it was time to start taking them outside. They didn't do much more, on their first excursion, than stumble around on the sand, tripping over each other and trying to sniff everything, testing their connections to each other and Bo in the pack-sense when they were out of sight. A few days later, when they'd gotten more confident--and when Nate was reasonably certain that _peanut butter cookies_ wouldn't make a break for the fence line and run himself straight into a snake or a scorpion or a particularly sharp rock--Bo took the litter down to the platoon's barracks tent after evening chow to introduce them to the rest of the wolves.

The pups crowded together in a seven-headed and seven-tailed lolloping mass as they crossed the camp. They stayed between Bo in the lead and Nate on their six, and Nate felt foolishly, helplessly proud to finally be catching stares from everyone they passed because of his sister's presence instead of her absence. By the time they reached the barracks tent, Mike and Ash were waiting at the entrance, the only ones in sight. Nate could feel the suppressed excitement of the rest of the men and wolves all crowded together inside, waiting with careful restraint.

Bo greeted Ash with a friendly lick and then stepped aside, nosing the pups forward and impressing upon all of them Ash's position in the platoon as Bo's second. The pups were not yet great respecters of precedence, and stumbled forward in a cheerful and curious mass to sniff and lick and crash up against this new wolf, mother-but-not-their-mother. Ash stood patiently among the pups, only cuffing them away when _shamal outside the tent_ and _shamal outside the den_ tried to climb her back legs, aiming for her belly.

Mike laughed, nudging them gently away with his toe. "Nothing there for you, guys."

The pups redirected immediately to trying to climb Mike, and he crouched down to meet them, holding his hands out. _Oscar Mike_ shoved her siblings aside to get the first sniff of Mike, nipping at his thumb until he swatted her over onto her back. That gave the rest of the pups an opening, and they swarmed around him, worrying at his bootlaces and the folds of his trousers while _blacksnake_ , left to her own devices, sat between Ash's feet and looked up adoringly at her. 

When Mike had had enough of the pups--his and Ash's nostalgic fondness was, Nate thought, mostly confined to the private pack-sense link they shared with Nate and Bo--he stood up, pushing them gently back down to the sand. Bo stepped in to corral them all--including _blacksnake_ \--and Ash helped, cuffing and nosing them into place. When the pups were assembled together, Bo finally turned and led them into the tent, where twenty-one men and twenty-one wolves were waiting, quivering with anticipation. Visibly, in Dusty's case: Christeson was kneeling with both arms around his brother, barely out of puppyhood himself, to keep him still while Bo and the litter walked in.

Doc Brunny and Doc Bryan were arrayed with the team leaders in front of the rest of the men and wolves, and Bo greeted them all with a low _woof_ and stepped aside again, letting the pups loose to meet them at will.

Nate grinned as the pups all froze, overwhelmed by the sudden presence of the entire pack. Then Doom, sitting beside Frost, dropped down onto his belly and rolled onto his side, tongue lolling out in a big wolfish grin, and _Oscar Mike_ ran toward him, the rest of her siblings trailing after (although _blacksnake_ kept looking back toward Bo and Ash). _Peanut butter cookies_ ran right onto Frost's front paws as he followed the others to Doom, and he looked up curiously at the big white wolf.

Frost licked the top of the pup's head, and then went back to sitting upright, watching the commotion. Nate looked away from Frost, and didn't look at Brad to see what he thought. It was a physical effort not unlike holding his breath, but he'd done harder things in recon.

 _Shamal coming_ had scrambled over to introduce himself to Hurricane, and Tiger and Miller were pinching in to surround the pups and incidentally press closer to Bo, who touched noses with each of them and then moved further into the tent, leaving the pups under the general supervision of the platoon while she moved from one wolf to another, reasserting her presence.

 _Blacksnake_ gravitated back to Ash while the rest of the pups gradually spread out. Nate watched the general motion, trying not to focus too much in any one direction, nor take too much note of which men and which wolves were uncomfortable with pups. It was common enough among young men and young dog wolves, and Navi and Ray's cooing overenthusiasm more than made up for any other reticence the pups encountered.

Nate moved through the tent in the pups' wake, collecting grins and inane compliments on the pups, touching the men's shoulders in the same way Bo had to nose at each of their brothers. Even though Nate had been getting out among the men all along, the platoon felt properly present to him for the first time in weeks now that Bo was here, bringing the wolves properly back in line. He made sure to pause beside Trombley and his brother, squeezing Trombley's shoulder. 

Trombley looked up at him with a smile. "They're so little, sir." 

Nate was about to laugh and protest that they were getting so big when he caught the mental image that Trombley and his brother shared: the mental image of the wolf snapping one of them up in a single bite.

Nate blinked and nodded, squeezed Trombley's shoulder again, and locked away the image and the impulse to treat it as a real threat. It would have been easier if it hadn't been quite so detailed--the snap of tiny bones under teeth--but anyone who spent any time at all in the pack-sense learned to put aside thoughts not meant to be shared. 

Still, Nate looked back when he realized that _Oscar Mike_ 's explorations had led her over to Trombley and his brother. They both watched the pup with cheerful curiosity, entirely without fear or even the nervousness that most of the wolves showed in one fashion or another, since one wrong move with the pups would bring down Bo's wrath, and then Ash's and the rest of the pack in short order. 

But Trombley, of course, was mostly oblivious to that. He crouched beside his brother and held out his hand to _Oscar Mike_ , who sniffed at him and then bypassed him to get to his brother. When the odd-eyed wolf lowered his nose to her level, _Oscar Mike_ barely hesitated before she lunged in and bit.

It was no playful puppy-nip, not even a swaggering try at asserting herself from the tiny alpha bitch in the making. Her tiny jaw couldn't span Trombley's brother's muzzle, but _Oscar Mike_ delivered an obvious, confident dominance-bite, and there was no mistaking what the tiny pup was thinking, asserting her position over this strange wolf who was halfway out of her mother's pack, a stranger even in the pack-sense, where every other wolf in the tent radiated belonging. 

Trombley and his brother both stayed still under the tiny, improbable assault. Nate recognized, somewhere very detached, that that was all the evidence he could want that neither of them actually intended any harm to the pups, because this was a perfect provocation. They showed nothing but puzzlement; they lacked enough connection to the pack-sense, or enough understanding of the dynamics of the platoon, to grasp the insult--the child's declaration of the Emperor's nudity--represented by this one tiny pup and this one stinging bite. 

In the next second Bo was there, grabbing _Oscar Mike_ by the scruff and giving her a quick, sharp shake before dropping her to the floor. The pup rolled over quickly, whining, and Bo nosed at her roughly and then shoved her away, and _Oscar Mike_ rolled to her feet and scurried away, making a beeline for Ash and bullying _blacksnake_ out of the place between her forepaws. 

Bo, meanwhile, turned her attention to Trombley's brother, licking over the bite on his muzzle even as he bowed to her. He did understand who was stronger than him and who was in charge. This was no perfunctory greeting or acknowledgement; Bo washed the young wolf's face thoroughly, and when he finally squirmed over onto his back to escape, Bo continued to fuss over him. 

Nate felt something shift in the pack-sense, a release of tension entirely separate from the caution the whole platoon was showing toward the pups. He looked up and found half the platoon watching Bo with Trombley's brother. The other half were fussing over the pups, but they were all paying attention to this, watching Bo lay unmistakable claim to her least promising subordinate. It didn't erase the wolves' superstition, but it was at least the first step to making the superstition just a quirk, not a barrier between Trombley and his brother and the rest of the platoon.

Nate turned his attention to Trombley, who was looking down at his brother with a sort of fond pride, like getting this much attention from the LT's sister was some sort of accomplishment. He put his hand on Trombley's shoulder, and Trombley looked up at him with a smile. Nate smiled back, trusting that Trombley had no idea of the tension behind it. 

"Little things can pack a punch," Nate said. Trombley's grin widened even as Nate let go of him and turned away, keeping his eyes turned down as he went to see where _peanut butter cookies_ had gotten to while everyone else was distracted.

* * *

After that, Bo seemed to realize how much the platoon needed her. Whenever Doc Brunny wasn't enforcing a rest break back in the den, she was with Nate, trailing the pups after her. Ash and the rest of the platoon's wolves happily pitched in to herd them. By the end of the week, Nate and Bo had found a few bitches among the H&S wolves who could keep the pups more or less in line in Bo's absence, and Bo was joining in on PT and training exercises while the pups were babysat. They got periodic radio-calls asking them to use Bo's pack-sense connection with the litter to figure out where _peanut butter cookies_ had wandered off to, but otherwise the arrangement seemed to work all right. 

In the third week of March, closing in on two months in Kuwait, they finally pulled a full live-fire exercise with the Humvees and machine guns. They'd been directed to make it as real as possible, so Nate and Mike pulled Lilley aside quietly and briefed him on his special role. Bo and Fluffy had a separate negotiation to be sure the surprise would stay out of the pack-sense until the big moment. 

The early part of the exercise, simulated contacts and shooting up dead tanks, went off without a hitch--everything textbook, radio calls backing up the pack-sense. The wolves had to keep their heads down through all of it, tucked away into the armored boxes in the Humvees, but they kept the pack-sense tight and clear and caught their brothers' exhilaration at the real-feeling one-sided battle, with choppers coming in overhead in support and the impressive noise of live fire. Nate felt the moment when all the aggravations and divisions melted away and the platoon _clicked_ into a perfect machine for waging war, like they'd been back during the birthday hunt.

And then he reached down to Bo, crouched between his legs with her front half out of her armored box, and told her to destroy it.

Like flipping a switch, she expelled Lilley and Fluffy from the pack-sense, cutting them off as sharply as if they'd died. Nate watched their victor slew wildly out of line as the disappearance reverberated through the entire platoon, the game suddenly becoming horribly real. Even knowing that Bo had done it, Nate felt the same spark of horror that was kindling through the rest of the men: in battle conditions the very best that such an abrupt sundering of the pack-sense could mean was that the wolf and man who'd gone dark had been badly injured and the pack-sense had momentarily dropped out. At worst it meant they'd been killed instantly.

The rest of the Humvees were braking. Nate grabbed his radio as he pushed fortitude through the pack-sense. "Move, move, move, clear the kill zone!" 

He felt One Alpha recover first, Brad going ice-calm and dragging his own team with him before his coolness spread to One Bravo. Team Two snapped into place a second later, Pappy aligning automatically on Brad, and they sped up to close the hole and stay on One Alpha's six. Mike stuck with them as well, and Nate could feel Christeson and Stafford, behind them, staring back as Tony got control of One Bravo's Humvee and started steering it back toward the line. 

Nate pictured what he wanted, pushing the image to the whole platoon as he called on the radio for Team Three to make a hole for One Bravo.

When they'd all reached the designated safety zone, men and wolves swarmed out of every vehicle to get to One Bravo. Christopher, even though he should have been able to see what was really happening, sounded entirely sincere shouting for the corpsmen. "Man down! Wolf down!"

Doc Bryan and Doc Brunny were converging at full speed, Miller and Tiger racing ahead of them to clear their paths and get first looks at the stricken man and wolf, but Bo flashed past all of them like a guided missile. She leaped straight up onto the hood of the Humvee to get at the driver and his brother. Even as Nate felt the realization rippling out through the pack-sense that Lilley and Fluffy were both unharmed--and Garza asked Lilley how it felt to be fucking dead--Bo pressed her nose against Fluffy's neck, snapping both of them back into place in the pack-sense.

Lilley opened his eyes and said, "It felt very sad, I felt very alone," and the truth of that followed his words through the pack-sense. All of them shared Lilley's memory. The numb strangeness of being suddenly cut off in the presence of the platoon was twinned to their shock at losing him when they thought they were safe. 

Men automatically stepped aside at Nate's approach, and he grabbed Lilley's shoulder, needing the physical reconnection as much as Bo had. "Good work, Lilley. You made a good combat casualty. Welcome back."

The men and wolves crowded in as Nate stepped back and Bo jumped down off the Humvee, ragging on Lilley as the wolves hauled Fluffy bodily down to the ground to tussle with him. It was all the same thing, testing to be sure that their teammates were back where they belonged, among the living.

"Team leaders," Nate called out, tugging the men he wanted through the pack-sense, "let's do a little after action on this."

When the men had all gathered around him--the wolves mostly stayed in circulation, keeping an eye on the teams, though Frost and Blue took up watch positions just outside the team leaders' huddle--Nate asked them about their concerns first. They sounded off, venting the worries that had already been circulating through the pack-sense before the exercise: lack of practice with the machine guns, lack of batteries, lack of maps. Only Pappy kept quiet, but Nate thought they'd have to be in much worse shape before Pappy would complain directly about anything. 

In return, Nate offered the only reassurances he could give them: batteries and maps had been promised. They would make do with whatever preparation they got. It was very nearly a rote exchange--after seven weeks they all knew there were no batteries, and they all knew batteries had been promised--but it settled them all into their places, platoon commander and team leaders. The fact that they didn't bring up anything Nate didn't already know about meant he wasn't missing anything new, at least.

Then it was Nate's turn. He reviewed the early part of the exercise, pushing that feeling of perfect coordination they'd achieved as he went down the checklist of things they'd done right: dispersion, geometry of fire, perfect as a textbook exercise could be. 

"We got into trouble when we lost Lilley," Nate said, looking around at them. These men had all seen action in Afghanistan; he knew that Pappy and Brad, at least, knew how it felt to have a teammate go down in action. He also knew that Tony didn't; their platoon hadn't suffered any casualties. But Tony, right there on the spot, had handled the casualty as well as he could; Nate was worried about the rest of the teams. Recon didn't normally operate this way, with the whole platoon together. The pack-sense that coordinated a single team behind enemy lines was almost a liability when it held twenty-three men and wolves together across five vehicles. The hunt was one thing, but this was war. 

"You slowed your vehicles," Nate said. "You don't stop in a kill zone."

Brad was guarded, Tony trying to make himself think of it tactically, and not focus on the prospect of the rest of the platoon abandoning One Bravo. Lovell seemed resigned, struggling to connect SOP to the reality of that feeling, a platoon member suddenly ripped away. 

It was Pappy who spoke up this time, and Nate caught the edge of the very memory Nate had relied on to make sure he got this right: his teammates being wounded in Afghanistan, and the way his team had stuck together to pull him out. Recon didn't leave anyone behind, man or wolf. Out loud, Pappy said, almost neutrally, "You mean maneuver past the vehicles down and leave them?"

Nate nodded, pushing the distinction to all his team leaders in the pack-sense: every Humvee was a team, now, and they were all used to teams being on their own and looking out for their own members. Even if they were still in sight, and so tightly connected in the pack-sense, every team was a separate unit. "You know the SOP. Assault through the ambush; if anybody's left behind, you maneuver to do support by fire."

"None of us are any good to anybody if we're dead," Mike added, pushing his own endorsement into the pack-sense, backing Nate up with all the recon experience he had to add to Nate's mere lieutenant's bars. 

There was a silence after that, and it took Nate a couple of beats to recognize it as a hesitation. Pappy and Tony and Lovell were also frowning thoughtfully at the dirt, digesting what the SOP really meant, but Brad was biting his tongue on something. Nate had a flash of déjà vu; Brad had hesitated like this before he'd challenged Nate and Mike on what to do about Trombley. 

And Nate had shut him down hard. Nate waited, watching Brad, until Brad glanced up and said, "Sir, not to question the SOP..."

Nate raised his eyebrows, inviting the question. 

Brad looked down, reaching out to line up a few rocks to represent the platoon in its line of vehicles, illustrating his idea on the ground as well as picturing it through the pack-sense as he spoke. "If we have a disabled vehicle, the nearest element could stop and evaluate the Marines while other elements push through and provide support by fire."

Nate glanced over at Mike, privately pushing the whole calculus of the question at him: the merit of the idea itself, balanced against the fact that the idea came from Brad, and Nate's uncertainty of whether he was too eager or too reluctant to agree with his team leader, his fear of overthinking all of this. 

Mike nodded with barely a hesitation, a faint amusement coming through their private pack-sense connection. Nate kept a straight face and looked back at Brad as he nodded. "Yeah, that works, Brad." 

Nate glanced over at the others, taking in all of his team leaders as he went on, "But only if you don't let emotions take over as you assess the situation. You have to be prepared for the pack-sense to be disrupted. You have to be able to function through it. But in principle, it works."

Nate looked back to Brad, meeting his eyes squarely. "It's good."

He stood, then, releasing them all with a gentle shove through the pack-sense as he glanced at his watch. They had half an hour to get back to Matilda for chow, and Nate pushed that awareness to the team leaders and felt it filter outward to the men and wolves, hunger pangs suddenly apparent, everyone hustling toward their own vehicles.

They'd been huddled up near One Alpha's Humvee, though, so Brad was standing by his open door when Bo returned to Nate's side and Nate started to head toward his own vehicle. He hesitated, shoulder to shoulder with Brad, facing away. 

Quietly, keeping it as much out of the pack-sense as he could, Nate said, " _That's_ why you're here, Sergeant."

Nate felt a little thaw in Brad's usual reserve, a brief pleased acknowledgement. Before he could risk it turning into anything more, Nate walked away.

* * *

On their way back, Bo perched half out of her box with her head on Nate's thigh as she reached out for the pups. Now, with the action done and the platoon headed safely home, Nate realized along with her that they had gotten through the entire hours-long exercise without thinking of the pups. They'd been immersed entirely in the work of commanding the platoon, the action and the plans and worries that followed from it. 

The pups, when properly in contact with Bo and Nate again, were safe and sound, unharmed by the neglect, content to go on playing with the wolves who were looking after them. Still, it came as a surprise when they returned, checking in on the litter before worrying about chow, to find Whitmer kneeling by the pups while they climbed all over Astra.

Nate stopped short while Bo barreled forward and the pups all scrambled toward her, letting out their little puppy barks of delight. The pack-sense bonds between them brightened and tightened with proximity and attention, but Nate pushed that aside to focus on the human before him. 

Whitmer stood, brushing off the knees of his trousers, and said simply, "Tomorrow, Nate. There's a bitch down at Commando who just weaned her pups; she had eight, and one of them was every bit as alpha as Bo's little girl. She's the best fit they're ever going to find, and there are two other litters in need of fostering, so if Bo tries to throw a wrench in this there are other pups who will take her."

"No," Nate said mechanically, even as he watched the pups half-climbing Bo, wanting to nurse immediately, still so tiny and soft around the edges, so much younger than last year's litter when they were weaned. "We're ready."

* * *

There was another shamal overnight, and Bo and Nate both stayed awake through it. Bo lay across Nate's outstretched legs, the pups piled on his thighs and belly and chest and cradled in his arms. He made himself notice how much more space they took up now, the way they constricted his breathing. He focused on the impossible incongruity of this, sitting covered in sleeping puppies while his men battled the storm, working to get a collapsed tent upright again. Mike was out there along with half of Bravo Two. Brad was out there. Nate should have been, but he was tucked away safely with the pups instead, for one last night.

Bo was a wolf; she didn't bother to brace herself for the separation or try to find the upside of it. She just lay awake, breathing in the smells of her pups, playing with each one when they woke, testing again and again the pack-sense connections between them. A mother never really lost all connection with her offspring. Some little echo always remained.

It didn't feel that way, though. The next morning they took the pups out to an HQ tent where Whitmer was waiting, and with him a staff sergeant and his sister, a gray bitch who still looked ready to nurse pups. Nate exchanged salutes with the staff sergeant--there would be a letter from BreedCom later to tell him the man's name, but right now Nate didn't give a sandblasted fuck--and Bo nudged the pups toward the bitch. It was just the same way she'd turned them over to half a dozen different wolves for safekeeping, every day of the last two weeks. 

The pups trotted over, eager to meet the stranger, and the gray bitch nosed at them, cuffing _Oscar Mike_ aside when she snapped at the others. Nate turned away, and Bo followed him out of the tent. They stopped ten meters away, in the lee of the junior officers' tent where he and Bo had barely set foot for the last month. Nate dropped to his knees beside her, and Bo did for real what she'd done as an exercise the day before: she expelled all seven of the pups from the pack-sense, sharply and finally. 

The place where they weren't felt raw, like the place where a fingernail had torn away, and Nate knew it was even worse for Bo. Through her ears he could hear the pups crying, suddenly alone. Worse, he heard them quiet down a few minutes later, soothed when their foster mother gathered them into her own pack-sense, taking the place Bo had left.

Nate closed his arms around Bo and held her tight, the connection between them running with things that couldn't be put into words or simple smells or sensations. Eventually Nate got to his feet, tugging Bo gently by the scruff of her neck. Bo stood up and shook off his grip, trotting ahead of him to the morning briefing, head up, ears forward.

They took their usual place next to Mike and Ash, and Bo flopped down half onto Ash, who tolerated it despite the warmth of the morning, threatening worse for the rest of the day. Mike pushed a wordless question at Nate, pointing out to him at the same time the wistfulness of the whole platoon at the departure of the pups. Ray had suddenly become a full-time repeater of all the most gruesome stories about pups being killed at forward camps, and most of the platoon was following suit, clinging to the silver lining in all of this in their own way. 

Nate smiled faintly and shrugged. There was no way weaning the pups at five weeks could have gone well, exactly, but they'd done it, and it could have been much worse. 

Nate settled in to listen attentively to the morning briefing, a plan that was derailed five minutes in when Godfather introduced them all to Evan Wright, a reporter from _Rolling Stone_ who would be embedded with First Recon for the invasion. Most of the wolves in the little tent shifted around to get a sniff of the stranger. Nate felt a frisson of wariness passing through them, up and down the branches of the chain of command, as they got the measure of this wolfless man who couldn't possibly understand what he was about to witness. He stood there with a slightly foolish smile on his face, wearing a t-shirt and boonie hat, clutching a notebook, looking every inch the unprepared liability he was bound to be.

But Bo pushed one single indelible impression toward Nate as she stood up to take his scent: _pup_. 

It took Nate a few seconds to understand what she sensed from Wright, but when he caught it he knew exactly what Bo meant. There was a little spark in the wolfless man, a faint but unmistakable glint of potential, exactly like a pup who wasn't yet old enough to connect independently to the pack-sense. Most humans had that potential, but it faded as they aged. At eighteen or nineteen it was still pretty easy to find, and even at the advanced age of twenty-two most officer candidates managed to make the connection. Wright had to be in his late thirties, at least--he'd have been an unpromising recruit on every level--but in terms of the pack-sense he wasn't entirely a lost cause.

Bo stayed focused on Wright through the rest of the briefing; by the end of it Nate had a much better acquaintance than he wanted with what Wright had eaten last and his level of cardiovascular fitness. When the briefing ended, most of the officers headed out of the tent on paths that kept them away from Wright. Bo slipped past them like a salmon swimming upstream, and Nate watched Wright resist the impulse to back away or call for help as the big desert wolf bore down on him. He'd obviously been briefed on dealing with wolves, and just as obviously he'd been ignored by practically all the ones he'd met so far. Wright stood his ground and spread his hands out slightly, letting Bo sniff and shove at him. Nate glanced around to see Godfather watching, looking benignly amused, and looked back for Mike, who gave him a sense of fond resignation before walking away.

Nate walked over to Wright and said, "Sorry, my sister was eager to get a feel for you."

"Yeah," Wright said, sounding only slightly strangled. Nate looked down and remembered how that felt, when you weren't a wolf's brother, being irresistibly aware that the distance between your balls and a wolf's teeth was measured in an uncomfortably small number of inches. "She's--you're officers."

Nate nodded. "Officer bitches are slightly overrepresented in recon. We're very strong in the pack-sense."

Wright nodded slowly, obviously taking mental notes. 

"I'm sorry, I'm being rude," Nate added, offering his hand to shake. "Lieutenant Nate Fick, commanding Bravo's second platoon. My sister is Bo."

Wright cautiously shook Nate's hand, like he was expecting a crushing grip. 

Bo dropped to sit between them and looked up at Nate. _Ours_.

Nate looked down at her. He'd known this was coming, really; he'd had at least fifteen minutes of warning. He knew exactly what she meant, and he knew better than to argue with her. He wanted it as badly as she did, something to take up that raw empty place where the pups had been. 

He looked back up at Evan with what he was almost certain was an unremarkable smile. "So, you're billeted with battalion HQ?"

"Yeah," Evan said cautiously, still looking back and forth nervously from Bo to Nate, but still not backing down. "That's, uh, that's where they put me."

Nate nodded. "You know, if you want a real look at what's going on, you should get in with the enlisted men. There's space in Bravo Two's barracks tent, and we have an empty seat in one of the Humvees. You could come with us, be right on the front line."

Nate watched the thoughts cross Evan's face, almost as clear and obvious as if he were in the pack-sense; the reporter had no poker face. Uncertainty over how best to fit in warred with his eagerness to get closer to the real story, and over it all, a sensible fear of offending the bitch who sat at his feet.

"That sounds great," Evan said after several seconds. "I'd really appreciate that, Lt. Fick." 

He looked down and added, in a level tone, no sign of thinking he was speaking to a dog or a child, "Thanks, Bo."

Bo got to her feet again in a fast, fluid motion that made Evan twitch. She pressed her nose to the inside of his bare wrist and gave a soft _whuff_ of maternal approbation. _Yes. Ours._

* * *

By the time the warning order came down--along with its attendant omen, the pizza trucks--Evan seemed to have settled into place in the platoon. He was halfway between a wolfless man and an adopted puppy, and the men treated him roughly but possessively. 

Still, Nate wasn't altogether surprised when Brad hesitated with his hand just short of the maps Nate offered him. Nate didn't look around; the whole camp was barely-controlled chaos, and the pack-sense was full of the frantic, exhilarated scattering of every man and wolf's attention. No one would ever be paying them this little attention again. 

Evan was five meters away, half a dozen Marines gathered around him, kibitzing as he packed his gear. Frost was on his six, supervising him from a couple of meters back, while Bo stood between Brad and Nate. 

"Sir," Brad said, not whispering but pitching his voice too low to carry far. "You've thought through what it means, having the reporter with us?"

"If we go to hell," Nate filled in. 

Brad nodded shallowly. "He'll be at ground zero, and he's got a great big platform to spill all the details he can come up with."

Nate looked away. Even now, even given what they were talking about, it was difficult to ignore the illicit thrill of talking privately to Brad, of acknowledging what was between them. 

"Godfather invited him to embed with First Recon, Brad. No matter what, he's going to be close enough to write about it if something goes really wrong in Bravo Two. So we can leave him somewhere else to write gossip about a charlie foxtrot he hears about going down among some leathernecks he doesn't know...."

Brad huffed, wolflike, and Nate had to look back. Brad was smiling slightly, but he was the one looking away now. "Or we let him get to know us. Hell, by the time anything happens I'll probably have saved his life under fire."

Nate nodded, and didn't add that if anything happened, Brad would need someone loudly telling his side of the story more than Nate would. If this all came crashing down, it would inevitably land harder on the career NCO than the junior officer still in his first hitch. None of it would be Brad's fault, and Evan would be in exactly the right position to see that. "That's the spirit."

Brad shook his head, still smiling faintly. He didn't say a word, and he was as closed off as Nate was in the pack-sense. 

"Brad," Nate said, and something in his tone of voice made Brad meet his eyes. Nate held his gaze. "If you don't want him with you...."

"No, sir," Brad said, his smile vanishing, though his gaze held steady. "No point coming this far and then not using every last resource available. I trust your call."

Nate offered a tentative smile of his own. "Good, because Bo didn't give me a lot of choice about adding him to the platoon. If you don't keep him he's going to spend the entire invasion rattling around the back of my vehicle with Christeson and Stafford."

"By all means let us save the world from that view of the invasion, sir," Brad said. "Not that Ray's much better."

"I'm sure Corporal Person will offer him many and varied insights," Nate agreed. Ray would keep Evan occupied; One Alpha talked out loud more than the other teams anyway, to keep Trombley in the loop. They'd be the least unnerving for Evan, who probably wouldn't find Trombley and his brother as off-putting as the wolfbrothers of the platoon did. If Evan was going to like and bond with any team, it would be One Alpha.

"You are assured of this," Brad said, lips twitching in one last smile, and he finally closed his hand on the map Nate was holding out, letting it bridge the distance between them for a second before Nate let go. 

Nate turned away without saying anything more; with Brad and Evan squared away he still had an endless list of things to see to before they stepped off.But his shoulders felt lighter than they had in days, and Bo's feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as she trotted ahead of him, clearing his way.

* * *


	4. Iraq, March-June 2003

Their first day in Iraq was half over by the time they got a chance to do anything useful. Bravo Two was leading the way as First Recon pushed north when Brad called back over the radio. At the same time he pushed the Blue Force Tracker's information through the pack-sense to Nate, giving him an image of the approaching road and the map. Their route was about to take them across a blacktop road, and Iraqis could easily approach the column from either side. 

"Hitman Two, this is Two One. Do you want my victor to provide overwatch on the northeast corner of the MSR?"

It was a logical task for the forward unit in the column, so Nate had no problem approving Brad's suggestion. It was probably a one-team job, but Nate didn't want One Alpha to wind up at the back of the battalion while the rest of them went on at the front. 

"Roger that," Nate replied over the radio, pushing the order through the pack-sense. "This is Hitman Two. All Hitman victors align off Two One."

Bo scrambled half into his lap as the order reverberated through the pack-sense. It was almost a literal thing; Nate could feel the platoon vibrating like a struck bell with the excitement of _having a mission_ , however small and impromptu.

When the vehicles were in place, blocking off the crossing for the rest of the column, Bo jumped through the window before Nate could open the door. She and Ash immediately headed in opposite directions, checking in with the wolves in each vehicle. 

Between the MOPP suits and the Scud attacks, the wolves were all miserable and on edge. None of them really understood the possibility of gas attacks or long range missiles; they trusted their brothers' insistence that the attacks were happening, or could happen, but it meant they were convinced that their enemies were just out of sight every second. Thankfully none of them had yet gotten hold of the idea of enemies who were undetectable but present, though Nate had a feeling some bright spark would dump that into the pack-sense before long. On top of the paranoia the wolves were spending most of their time just cooped up in the Humvees, unable to contribute much of anything to an invasion that rolled along in a convoy at highway speeds.

One Alpha and Team Two's wolves spilled out of the Humvees after their brothers to watch the road in both directions, and Bo was already in among the wolves on the western approach, shoving her nose in at the collar of each one's MOPP suit, by the time Nate walked up. 

She darted past Nate, back to One Alpha's vehicle, to check that Evan was still safely inside. He glanced up nervously from scribbling notes when Bo stuck her head in the window, but she gave him only a perfunctory sniff and then returned to the cluster of men and wolves tucked up against Team Two's vehicle. Nate considered going over and explaining her behavior to Evan, but before he could take a step Navi ran out into the middle of the road, cocking her head to listen. 

Ray yelled for her, but Navi stayed put for another second, until it was obvious that the rest of the wolves could also hear vehicles approaching up the road, and only then did she allow Frost to drag her--by the scruff of her neck, dutifully avoiding a puncture of her MOPP suit--back into cover. By then the humans could hear the trucks coming and Manimal and Rudy had their scopes up. They called out visual details: two pickups, white with red diamonds on the doors, armed men in civilian clothes.

Nate called it in to Schwetje, letting himself feel a little of the crackle of excitement that the rest of the platoon was sharing. This was the enemy, and they were about to engage. Nate had his eyes on Bo as he spoke to Schwetje. She was leaning out past the front bumper of the forward Humvee, listening intently toward the pickups even as they came to a halt twenty meters off. 

_What?_ Nate nudged her through the pack-sense, and Bo gave it to him: it felt distant and faint, but as tangible through Bo's senses as the fact of the pickup trucks and the men. The men in the pickup trucks shared pack-sense. They were wolfbrothers, and they were almost certainly concealing wolves in the trucks. 

Bo shared it with the wolves in the next second, confident now that Nate had recognized what she sensed. Navi came around next to Bo to listen, and Ash came racing up from the other end of the line. Every wolf present was trying to detect wolves in those trucks. Wolves meant combatants, especially--as they had all been briefed ad nauseam at Camp Matilda--here in Iraq, where Muslim laws regarding wolves and homosexuality meant that wolf-bonding was a serious commitment to the warrior's life, much closer to the isolation of the old-fashioned wolfthreat than anything in the Western world. Even without uniforms, armed men bound by pack-sense, with wolves present, were bound to be a legitimate target.

None of the wolves, including Bo, could smell or hear wolves in the trucks. They couldn't smell or hear the humans, either; between the usual diesel stink of running vehicles and the engine noise, that wasn't especially unusual at this distance. Bo was still feeling out the pack-sense connections she'd picked up on, and it was beginning to dawn on Nate how strange this was: Bo had no connection with these men or the wolves they were bonded with. She wasn't--couldn't be--tracing chains of connection through some Great Pack down to the men in front of them. She sensed the connection itself, as if it were a sound or a smell the Iraqi pack used to communicate. It made sense--her ability to manipulate pack-sense connections was part of what made her an officer bitch--but Nate had never heard of wolves being able to sense unrelated packs this way, unless you counted those stories about Christmas truces across the trenches.

Still, it made sense, and Nate trusted Bo to know what she was picking up. There was room in the trucks to conceal wolves, and men riding around with AKs would conceal their wolves to muddy the waters the same as they would wear civilian clothes. 

The whole evaluation took seconds. Nate raised his radio again. "Hitman, I am seeing armed Iraqis in civilian clothes in white pickups marked with red diamonds." He pushed Bo's observations up through the pack-sense. "We have reason to believe there are wolves present."

One of the men--Nate didn't even register who--called out _We should smoke 'em, sir!_ and all the wolves were growling, Bo loudest of all. But Nate could feel what he wouldn't pass down through the pack-sense: Schwetje's frozen hesitation in the face of Nate's not-quite-question. When his voice finally came over the radio, Nate already knew he wasn't going to get the order he wanted.

"Hitman Two, this is Hitman. Interrogative. Can you, uh... Can you _see_ the wolves? If not we should wave them off. Over."

Nate bit back a reply about wolves' most useful senses, an argument about hobbling the most capable wolf in the company to the senses of the rest of her platoon, and everything else he wanted to say. 

"Hitman, this is Two. These are armed Iraqis in marked victors with weapons pointed at us. We have no eyes on wolves but we believe wolves are present. Over."

The hesitation was shorter this time; Nate could feel Schwetje settling into the comfort of a decision made, never to be revisited. "ROE states uniformed soldiers and confirmed bonded wolves only, and they should be actively attacking us."

It was a lost fucking cause, and even as Nate was locking himself down and tugging Bo through the pack-sense, trying to rein her in, he had to try one last effort. "This is Two. I'm requesting to at least snatch one victor, try to confirm wolves and find out who these guys are. Over."

There was no hesitation at all this time, no consideration given to the request. Even before he heard the words Nate shoved _Orders_ at Bo hard enough to make her pay attention. 

"Negative. Wave them off. Hitman out."

Bo stopped growling like someone had flipped a switch, and she fell into step with Nate as he broke cover and walked out into the middle of the road. They moved forward of all the men, waving off the vehicles with a broad, obvious gesture. It occurred to him as he did that the men probably couldn't even feel the difference from him. He was so shut down in the pack-sense all the time that they'd have no idea he was suppressing his judgment of the chain of command and his fury at this waste of intel--this failure to _close with and destroy the enemy_. They'd just see the LT keeping a straight face like always. 

Only Bo, snapping her teeth to emphasize his hand-waving, could feel his perfectly impotent anger, and even from her he had to hide away the full extent of his frustration. The last thing he needed was for her to think less of their commanding officer than she already did.

* * *

They stopped to dig in for their second night in Iraq a full hour before sundown, three hours after leaving the men who'd attempted to surrender to them in their dust.

The men who _had_ surrendered to them, Nate corrected his thought, standing on the edge of a canal like every other canal they'd driven along or over for the last day and a half. He closed his eyes and concentrated on keeping his thoughts carefully closed off even as they moved irresistibly in dangerous directions. The battalion had abdicated their legal and moral responsibility for those prisoners, in order to escape mortar fire and to reach this all-important position before nightfall. 

He could keep the truth straight in his own mind, at least, and not let that get swallowed up in the justifications, the chain of command, the determination to keep order, the....

The utter ease of yielding to authority, Nate had to admit to himself. Godfather had looked him in the eye and ordered him to do it and he hadn't even thought of resisting. It was only when he'd been looking at his own CO that the objection had occurred to him, and that told him altogether too much about his own instincts regarding his chain of command, at the same time that it made him horribly aware of how easily he had accepted what might very well have been an honest to God criminal order, casually issued without a pause for thought.

Bo butted her head against his thigh, exactly hard enough to rock him back on his heels without making him move his feet. 

Nate opened his eyes as he felt the wash of her concern, her mind nudging against the closed-off silence of his. He shoved his worries away--knowing, as he did, that that made him complicit all over again--to keep them from his sister. When he opened his thoughts to her, he pushed his exhaustion to the fore, letting her believe that his thoughts were a blank because he was close to falling asleep on his feet.

Bo stepped in closer, nosing at the palm of his hand, which was the only place she could touch him without pressing the abrasive inner layer of his MOPP suit against his skin. Nate crouched down, letting her press her face to his under the brim of his Kevlar. Bo exhaled a soft sigh and Nate echoed it. This was the one thing in the last several days that made any sense at all: he was going to war with his sister, doing the work she'd been born to do, and had chosen him for. Whatever else was wrong about this situation, she was right. This was right. 

Bo tensed--not pulling away, but putting him on notice--when someone approached their position. There was virtually no lag between knowing someone was there and knowing he was friendly and knowing it was Lovell, his brother Blue circling out beyond them to keep between the LT and his sister and any potential enemies. And still, somehow, Nate was conscious of an instant of hoping it was Brad who had come looking for him, before that hope existed only retroactively, as something too quickly crushed out of existence to be disappointment.

Nate rocked back on his heels, settling a hand on Bo's shoulders to push himself up onto his feet. He gave Lovell a brief, grim smile, and Lovell's nod in return betrayed no more than a professional interest in keeping tabs on his CO. Nate turned his back on the canal and the sweep of desert beyond it and headed toward his Humvee as Bo trotted on ahead.

* * *

They'd been stopped on the road outside Nasiriyah for an hour or so. Nate had all his team leaders briefed and Evan was safely corralled by the men, bouncing from team to team like a low-speed pinball with a notebook. Nate left the platoon to its TLs and sat down in the command vehicle. He knew he had to try to rest himself, but his brain kept running through checklists and flow charts. He had to be ready for the next thing: the next set of orders, the next move down the road, the next distant explosion, the possibility of a nearer attack while they sat here in the open.

He didn't expect the sudden detonation in the pack-sense. Bo launched into motion at what felt like ballistic speed, racing toward trouble. Nate tried automatically to close himself off, even as he realized that the pack-sense of the platoon had snapped into dangerously sharp alignment. The coordination of the hunt was suddenly running through twenty-two wolves--no. 

Twenty-one.

The pack was ready to hunt Trombley and his brother, set off by the jinx on the wolf's name. Nate swallowed hard, pushing away all the self-recriminations. He'd brought them all to this moment, and he didn't have time to think about how he could or should have avoided doing it. He just had to see it through, now. 

Bo already had Trombley's brother pinned to the ground. Nate made sure he had his own reactions in hand and cracked himself open enough in the pack-sense to show off his calm. It wouldn't reach the wolves, not now, when Trombley had stepped on the jinx like a landmine, but at least the men would sense it.

On his next stride forward Nate realized what Bo had never been less than perfectly aware of: Evan was standing next to Trombley. Evan was outside the pack-sense with Trombley, doing a very credible job of keeping his feet and standing still while, in Bo's expert judgment, fairly close to literally pants-shitting terror. Bo, with her paw on Trombley's brother's chest, was holding back the platoon's wolves not only from Trombley and his brother but from Evan, her wayward foster child.

 _Really going to have to explain that to him_ , Nate thought, with a distant glimmer of humor. 

He kept walking smoothly forward. All around him the platoon's wolves were straining toward Trombley, vibrating with the eagerness to expiate the jinx with blood. They were emitting a steady low growl that Nate felt in his bones as much as heard. Nate could feel the focused violence like a spotlight whose radius he stood just outside. No one was threatening him, but he was about to step between them and what they wanted.

He was going to have to do something to fix it when he got there. He walked slowly, taking the measure of the platoon. Now that they were past the first shock of the wolves' reactions, he could sense the men were as united in restraining the wolves as the wolves were in the urge to violence. Bo's emphatic claiming of Trombley's brother held them off, but they needed more. 

Superstition for superstition, then. Nate seized on the first one that he remembered. _Go outside, turn around three times, and--_

Nate closed his hand on Trombley's shoulder, clamping down hard. "Spit."

No one moved. Not Trombley, staring down fearfully at his trapped brother, who whined a little under Bo's paw. Not Evan, who looked like he was trying to disappear without moving. Not any of the growling wolves or the men holding them back, except for Christeson's ongoing slow collapse, dragging Dusty bodily to the ground.

"Spit the bad luck out of your mouth," Nate reiterated, shaking Trombley just enough to get his attention. If he started anything that looked like an attack, he was going to have twenty-one eager volunteers joining in.

No, Nate realized. Twenty. The unity of the platoon had cracked: Frost had shaken off the impulse to kill in favor of his stronger impulse to fall in line with whatever Bo wanted. 

Trombley ducked his head and spit, and Nate breathed in and out and still didn't look around. He saw Evan flinch, but Bo processed it instantly as a startled reaction to Frost pacing behind them, watching their backs. Frost was all but sending up fucking signal flares to show that his direct loyalty to Bo overrode his membership in the pack-sense of the platoon.

Nate kept his voice steady and tried to think of a next thing to say, because twenty wolves were still focused on him and Trombley, still wildly furious. This wasn't over yet, and he couldn't let Trombley move from this spot until they weren't all looking at him like prey to chase. And he needed them to focus on Trombley instead of Frost, needed to end this before Frost joined Bo in bossing the pack, because then it was all over in an entirely different way.

"Kick sand over it, Lance Corporal," Nate directed, pushing that little reminder of Trombley's rank--Trombley's membership in the pack--to everyone listening. "Bury it."

Trombley obeyed more quickly this time, and Nate pushed satisfaction and a sense of adherence to ritual to Bo as he looked up. Doc Brunny and Doc Bryan were standing by Team Three's Humvee, with Tiger and Miller perched on the hood behind them.

The pack-sense was too taken up with the platoon's fury for Nate to even try to communicate discreetly through it. Brunny took a look around the platoon and tilted his head, which Nate hoped was a neutral-to-hopeful assessment of Nate's progress in soothing the wolves. Bryan eyed Trombley and gave Nate a nod and a _go ahead_ flick of fingers.

"Now," Nate said, because he had to get Trombley out of the center of this somehow, and making the running away a part of the ritual ought to keep all the wolves still until they were really calm. "You're going to run three times around the platoon's victors. Counter-clockwise, for undoing. Your brother's going to lead, to clear your path. Step only where he steps. Go."

Nate felt Bo accept the terms. She moved back, letting Trombley's brother up, and Nate felt her shove her certainty that this would be sufficient through the rest of the pack-sense, quenching their bloodlust like a barrel of water onto a campfire. _Enough_.

Trombley's brother got to his feet and took off for the edge of the platoon's encampment, and Trombley stumbled after him, shambling into a run. Frost went with them, running out to flank Trombley so that he was between them and any possible pursuit. 

In the aftermath of that laser-focused fury, Nate could feel the whole platoon accept Frost's move as a matter of course. Of course it was Frost who enforced Nate's and Bo's edict; of course it was Frost who would supervise the most dangerous member of the platoon.

Nate kept breathing evenly and looked around the platoon, turning to take them all in, every last one. He didn't let his eyes linger on the sight of Brad walking away, going around the side of the Humvee to watch over Trombley, just as Frost was. 

Keeping his voice level, Nate said, "A quarter of you are on radio watch. The rest of you should be sleeping. We need to be rested and ready when the word comes down."

He turned toward Evan, then, turning his back on Brad in the same motion. Nate pushed the pack-sense aside as much as he could without actually asking Bo to shut them away, letting Mike and the TLs enforce his orders while he focused on their civilian. Evan's terror had faded into the muddy chaos of too many emotions for Bo to sniff out, especially from this side of a MOPP suit, and without any real pack-sense to go by. 

"Sorry about that," Nate said, eyeing Evan as Bo anxiously monitored his heartbeat and made educated guesses about his blood pressure. "You okay?"

Evan gave a game smile, slightly wild-eyed. "Yeah, uh, you know, a little heart failure maybe. Nothing serious." 

Nate nodded, looking for words to explain what had just happened to someone who could only perceive half of it. "Do you know what set them off?"

"Trombley said, uh--" Evan looked around. Nate could feel the wolves and men retreating to the Humvees behind him, the suddenly-halted fury still floating all around them like a dissipating cloud. "He said his brother's name. To me. Sorry."

Nate shook his head. "Not your fault. Lance Corporal Trombley knew that the wolves had picked up a superstition about his brother's name. He should have known better than to say it to anyone."

Evan squinted, smiling slightly. "Wolves have superstitions? I didn't think they--I mean, they're--" Evan looked down cautiously at Bo. "They're animals, they're not...."

"They're not independently sentient, no," Nate said, and looked down at Bo himself, watching her watch Evan. "They're very smart animals. But they're bonded to humans, and their ancestors have spent the last thousand years bonded to humans. They've picked up certain things in that time. We haven't been a very good influence on them."

"But you--you un-jinxed it, there? So it's okay now?"

Nate shrugged, and reached through the settling pack-sense to Brad's team. The link to Trombley and his brother was as dim and distorted as ever, though right now it was lightened a little by the intensity of Frost and Brad's focus. Trombley and his brother were both running hot, sweating in their MOPP suits, but as long as they were still sweating they were safe. On the other hand, they'd only made three quarters of their first lap.

"If Trombley and his brother go down with heat exhaustion before they finish three laps they won't have finished undoing the jinx, and that could be a problem," Nate said. "But they will do what they need to do."

Frost and Brad would see to that, Nate had no doubt.

Even as he thought it, Nate heard Brad call out, and felt Frost register the completion of one lap out of the necessary three. The whole platoon seemed to shift into a lower gear at that, tipping over into confidence that Trombley would complete the reversal of the jinx.

Evan looked past Nate, in Brad's direction, and Nate looked down at Bo, who was still watching Evan intently.

"Evan," Nate said, without looking up. "I need to explain the way my sister's been treating you."

"Oh!" Bo registered the sharp uptick of Evan's heart rate, diagnosing his surprise and discomfort even without pack-sense. "No, it's fine. I understand now."

Bo's mouth opened in a grin at the foolishness of her most hapless of pups, and Nate was startled into an entirely sincere smile as he looked up. "No, you don't. Bo's had a couple of litters now. She's a good mom--"

Bo's amusement fell away abruptly into longing for the pups, a yawning awareness of the empty place they had left and the faint whisper of blood-bound pack-sense that still connected her to them. She leaned into Nate, pressing the top of her head to his hip, and Nate set his hand on the back of her neck.

He went on with his eyes on Bo. He had to explain it for her sake as much as for Evan's, because she needed to be understood as much as Evan needed to understand. 

"Her second litter was born at Matilda. We had to give them up to be fostered at five weeks old, a few days before we rolled out. We probably won't see them again; by the time we get back they'll have been weaned and sent back to the States to bond. Bo needed someone to adopt, and as soon as she saw you she knew you needed adopting."

Nate didn't look up, and he hardly needed Bo's ears and nose to be aware of all the questions Evan was biting his tongue on. What he said, finally, was a hesitant, vague, "How long...?"

Nate did look up at that, smiling slightly again and choosing the easiest possible question to answer. "About ten minutes before we saw you for the first time. The second she saw you, I knew she wanted to drag you into her pack, and it's all just been downhill from there. I should tell you--the platoon knows--she gave you a scent-name, the same way she named her pups. I don't know if you can pick it up, if she tells it to you. I can describe it, if not."

Evan hesitated and then said, with an inexplicable slight shyness, "My, uh--my grandpa's wolf, when I was a kid...."

Nate nodded encouragingly, considering again the little spark of possible pack-sense that Evan still had. If he'd had contact with a wolf at an early age, maybe that had nurtured his potential just enough....

"He told me his name," Evan said, waving vaguely but illustratively at his own head. "I picked it up."

Bo seemed pleased by that beyond just the fact of being able to tell Evan his name, although Nate couldn't tell why exactly. He just felt her rush of intense satisfaction, things-going-right. Nate was vaguely aware of Brad's voice calling out behind him, but it was easy to ignore with Bo at his side and Evan, still uncertain, standing before him.

"Give it a try," Nate said, tilting his head toward Bo and trying not to grin like an idiot just because she was suddenly, for this one minute, so happy. "Ask her to tell you your name."

Evan looked down at Bo, and Nate watched them studying each other. He'd never seen anything like it before. Wolfless people generally didn't engage directly with her like that, and even if they tried Bo wasn't normally this interested. Wolfbrothers left it to their wolves to interact with her. Nate felt the shadow of a possessiveness he hadn't had to deal with since TBS creeping in-- _no, she's mine, get your own_ \--but he knew it wasn't that; Bo really did regard Evan as a particularly helpless adopted pup.

Evan folded down to his knees, putting himself on eye-level with her. "Bo. Could you--would you tell me my name? Please?" 

He sounded genuinely a little plaintive, and Nate couldn't help sharing Bo's overwhelming maternal fondness for him, right then. Bo stepped toward him, pressing her nose to Evan's cheek, and Nate felt her accomplish the wildly improbable with the same blithe arrogance she brought to everything. She extended the pack-sense to a wolfless man, just long enough to press his name through the link and receive back a sense of Evan's fading fear, his curiosity and his willingness to go wherever this took them and then, for an instant before the tentative bond broke, his surprise.

Evan jerked back from Bo, scrubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand, and Nate grinned. He could almost taste Evan's scent name himself: _hot broken plastic and an explosion of ink_ , a cheap pen bitten until it burst.

Bo's lips drew back and her tongue lolled out. They both watched Evan realize that that had been the moment of communication and there was no actual ink in his mouth. 

Evan looked up at Nate with an uncertain smile, and Nate smiled back. "Mine's ink, too. Must run in the family."

Evan's smile widened, and there was an empty spot in Nate's chest, and in Bo's, where they ought to have been able to feel precisely how he felt about that. Still, this was enough to go on with. 

Evan looked Bo in the eye again, his smile bright. "Thanks."

Bo darted in and licked his cheek, and as she fell back to Nate's side Evan stood. "So, uh, I guess I'm adopted now?"

Nate nodded, but the intensity of Bo's focus on Evan was quickly unraveling: Trombley was approaching the end of his third lap, and Schwetje was moving toward them.

"Yeah," Nate said as his smile slipped away, unrecoverable. "It's not official, but we won't forget it. And if you want to practice some Arabic, I can start teaching you the names of Bo's Saudi ancestors."

Evan nodded agreeably. "Hey, speaking of names, is Bo--"

"Sorry," Nate said, as Yellowjacket came into view, Schwetje doubtless only a yard or two behind. Nate could feel their approach in the pack-sense. He had to brace himself for this, had to close himself as much as he dared while Bo shielded the platoon from their pack-sense link up the chain of command. 

"You should get some rest," Nate added vaguely, stepping around Evan to go and meet Schwetje as Trombley dropped to the sand and the jinx dissolved at last.

Schwetje was frowning but not hurrying, and his presence in the pack-sense was the usual light touch. Nate didn't try to reach out and find what he'd been doing for the last five minutes, why he was only now attending to the violent clusterfuck his second platoon had nearly collapsed into, to say nothing of the particular way Bravo Two's pack-sense had fractured under pressure.

"Hey, Nate," Schwetje said, and that was all it took, because Nate knew it should have been _Lieutenant Fick_. 

_Lieutenant, that was unacceptable_ , or _Lieutenant, we're reassigning half your men_ , or _Lieutenant, I want you to assemble your men so I can put the fear of God into each and every one of them_ or _Lieutenant, come with me_.

Instead Nate got his first name, pronounced almost but not quite as a question, and the knowledge that he'd said he could command Bravo Two under exactly these circumstances and that meant he had to keep doing it. He had to keep getting away with this whether he liked it or not. There was no other choice now; they'd come much too far for Nate to fail.

"Sir," Nate said, straightening his spine and clamping down a fraction harder on his presence in the pack-sense. 

"Felt like you almost had some kind of fight there," Schwetje observed, and Nate couldn't tell if he was understating or if Bo had managed to keep that much of a lid on it. Maybe Schwetje honestly couldn't tell that most of his platoon had come dangerously close to red-toothed murder on its way to a total reversion to the Old Ways. 

"No blood drawn, though, right?"

"Not a drop," Nate agreed firmly. He wasn't going to invite NJPs on his men. He'd handled it. "Just some hot tempers and the wolves setting each other off. They're fine now."

"Yeah," Schwetje agreed, looking over the platoon's encampment.

Schwetje frowned again as he looked around, and there was a wary hesitation to his presence in the pack-sense, a heavy tinge of _I hate to say it_. Nate braced himself--this was it, now he was going to get it.

"I couldn't help noticing--Yellowjacket jumped like his tail was on fire...."

Nate schooled his face to stillness, and Bo, beside him, was as carefully blank and empty as any desert vista.

Schwetje looked down directly at Bo, and it was so like and jarringly unlike watching Evan meet her eyes that Nate realized what was coming a split second before the captain said, "Nate, did Bo try to bring that reporter into the pack-sense?"

Nate swallowed disbelief, swallowed fury at the _priorities_ this suggested, and said neutrally, "Not on any kind of permanent basis, sir. She just reached out to him to let him in on the scent-name she came up with for him--kind of a joke around the platoon, we figured he should know."

"Yeah, obviously not permanent," Schwetje agreed, frown lightening. "Well, no harm done, right?"

"Yes, sir," Nate agreed, because there was nothing else he could say.

* * *

The night after Nasiriyah--after taking fire for the first time and coming through mostly unscathed, after Nate had looked at a man's face and pulled the trigger for the first time--he leaned against the hood of the command vehicle with Mike in the dark. The platoon was settled all around them, quiet and three-quarters sleeping in preparation for a day with four more towns to assault through.

Bo had noticed that Frost and Brad were on watch in the lead Humvee, and Nate couldn't avoid knowing it too. But he kept the awareness tamped down with the rest of his thoughts, though it did remind him to ask Mike, "Hasser's Mark 19?"

Mike nodded. "That lube they issued wasn't worth shit. It jammed on him--he couldn't even rack it today without it catching."

Mike conveyed to Nate the exact analogy--wordless and politely faceless--which Brad had communicated through the pack-sense to Mike when alerting him to the problem. Nate winced in appreciation at the idea of being fucked with lube that got you locked up as tight as a knotted bitch after a few strokes. At the same time he fought down the tangle of memory and humor and dangerous warmth that welled up in him, knowing everything Brad had meant--had remembered--behind that thought.

But there was no such anxiety disturbing Brad's presence in the pack-sense now--nor Walt's, which was probably more informative.

"Handled?"

"I know a few guys in the RCT," Mike agreed easily. "One of 'em was ... sympathetic to our plight."

A bitch's brother, Mike put quietly through the pack-sense, particularly susceptible to both the analogy and the possibility that the gun lube would be getting put to a variety of good purposes. 

Nate snorted, mentally counting off the weary and sleeping men all around him. "Does the RCT think we have time...?"

"We're Recon, Nate," Mike reminded him, his voice even while he smirked in the pack-sense. "We're the hardest motherfuckers out here. We get it done."

"Right," Nate agreed, and that was another problem solved without him having to deal directly with Brad, or risk showing favoritism, or be unduly harsh with him to avoid showing it. And if there was an ache in his chest--or maybe in Bo's, or somewhere between them--at the thought of letting someone else fix things for Brad... it was probably just that he hadn't slept enough.

"My watch, Nate," Mike said gently, settling a hand on his shoulder, a comforting weight through the MOPP suit. He pushed Nate gently toward the grave awaiting him, and Nate nodded mutely and followed Bo to it.

* * *

The radios were down, which was one thing, but Nate couldn't even get Schwetje's attention through the pack-sense. He had a sense of his CO entirely focused on _something_ , anxious-excited-determined. It was crowding out everything else, including any attention he might have given to pings from his platoon commanders. Nate couldn't force himself on his CO's attention, but he couldn't get _anyone_ to tell him why they'd stopped in an exposed position outside a hostile town. 

When Captain McGraw popped up at Nate's position convinced that Mike and/or Nate had been killed because no one in his platoon could reach anyone in Nate's, Nate spent a few seconds frozen in horror at the clusterfuck Bravo Company had just become. Bo, crouched beside him, coolly considered how much better the pack-sense would be functioning if only _she_ were in charge of the company.

Nate pictured--so vividly he didn't just see it in his mind's eye but felt in the muscles of his arm and hand--grabbing Bo by her scruff and yanking her over onto her back. He wouldn't actually do it--not here, not with McGraw and half their team leaders clustered around them--but this was exactly the most dangerous moment for Bo to be entertaining those thoughts. She was right and she knew it, and that made the chain of command a very slender leash to hold her by. 

Nate cut off that mental analogy before it went any further. The only way to keep order was to focus--and keep Bo focused--on the parts of this that they rightfully could and did control. He sent McGraw back to his own platoon, issuing a flurry of orders to Mike, Tony, Brad, and Pappy, while encouraging Bo to mobilize the wolves to more-than-triangulate sounds from the town for the benefit of the men. The pack-sense, taking in the locations of the wolves and combining their observations, could be pinpoint-accurate in identifying the source of gunshots, which they were clearly going to need.

Bo hunkered down by a Humvee. Nate headed off to find Captain Schwetje. He passed Navi getting into position with Frost almost on her heels, trying to steer her toward the safest available situation.

The next second, Nate realized that both Lovell and Doc Bryan were with Schwetje. Judging by their incredulous anger, whatever he was so intently concentrating on was about to boil over into outright insubordination on their parts. 

Bo felt it, too. Nate walked faster, sensing her interest in the matter. He gritted his teeth. _You can't_ , Nate told her, _You can't, you must stay, we lose everything if you get into this--_

Bo was already pushing the task of triangulation off on Navi, and Nate had to stop walking and push it at her full force: _They will take Frost and Brad away for real this time if you set foot in Yellowjacket's sight right now_. 

He made it as real as scruffing her--more real. He cracked open the things he didn't let himself think or feel, the dangerous joy he took in every hour he was allowed to be near Brad, the hope--the necessity--of being a part of what brought Brad and Frost through this war alive--and his absolute certainty that all of that would come to an abrupt and brutal end if Bo followed him into this now.

He felt something like a confused whine that he was sure Bo would never have given actual voice, and choked down the need and the despair both, trying to bring them both down to a scale she could handle. But Bo had already given in and was focused on sound-mapping their sector, and sparing what attention she could for an anxious determination to stop Nate from feeling what he'd shown her. Nate took another breath to drag himself under control, and then he was in motion again, because he could feel Doc Bryan's dangerously heedless fury, and the topic at hand finally cut through into Nate's complete awareness.

Captain Schwetje was trying to call in a danger-close fire mission, barely two hundred meters from their location, near enough to take out the entire company. Nate took off again at a run, locking down the knowledge, mechanically assuring even Bo that it would be all right.

None of the wolves really understood what happened when an artillery strike was called in; like many aspects of modern technological warfare it appeared more or less magical to them. They believed what the humans around them believed. Yellowjacket would raise no objections as long as Schwetje was convinced that an artillery strike two hundred meters away wouldn't come down on their heads--but if Lovell's or Bryan's far more realistic awareness of why _danger-close_ was called that got out into the company, Bo wouldn't have any problems recruiting the rest of the wolves to her mutiny. 

_Quarantine them_ , Nate demanded, tugging at Bo's attention, asking her to cut off Bryan and Lovell--and Miller and Blue, who were pacing anxiously around them--from the rest of the platoon to stop any spread of the information. Bo, still worried about him, complied with alacrity; the men were both stumbling back from Schwetje as Nate dashed up, a slightly shocky confusion on their faces. Nate gave a quick hand sign-- _it's okay, back off_ \--and he could see them getting hold of themselves even as Nate pushed into Schwetje's personal space.

He could feel it in the pack-sense when Schwetje's attention settled fully on him. Only then, when he was right in front of him, did he become entirely present to his CO, despite all his attempts to reach him through the pack-sense up to now. 

"Sir," Nate said. He didn't give voice to another word, but the aggressive way he was crowding his superior officer wouldn't go unnoticed, and he couldn't manage to keep himself throttled in the pack-sense. _What the fuck is going on? You're not on the radio, you're locked off in the pack-sense, no one can find you._

Nate felt Schwetje's awareness dart out and trace down the branches of the company; he felt the moment his CO discovered that he was blocked off from the two men standing there, which yanked his attention back to Nate before he could be usefully distracted by anyone else. 

"I'm calling in a fire mission," Schwetje said, with simple certainty. In the pack-sense Nate got the rest: his certainty that there was a hunter-killer RPG team lurking in the palm grove two hundred meters away. More than that, his implacable resolution on this point, which Nate knew wouldn't be shaken by anything anyone could say.

Nate turned away before he could give in to the impulse to say more and force the issue in some worse way than he already had. He crowded Bryan and Lovell back instead, shouldering them away from Schwetje and not-incidentally giving them both a little physical touch to anchor them, cut off as they temporarily were from the pack-sense. Blue and Miller had closed in close to their brothers, trying to make up the lack, which would also keep them from tangling with Yellowjacket or Gunnery Sergeant Griego's brother, Talon. 

Lovell seemed stunned silent--or maybe just worried about being cut off from his team--but Bryan had rebounded into anger already. He leaned in, crowding Nate right back. "Sir, I don't like this--"

He kept talking, but without pack-sense it was like he was on the other side of a glass wall; Nate could see that he was angry and afraid, but he couldn't let himself really hear it. He couldn't let _Bo_ hear it. If she believed the platoon--the company--was in danger she could avert, she wouldn't hesitate to call on Frost's support and call every wolf in range to follow her. Battalion HQ and their sister companies were just far enough out of reach to give her an opening, strung out along today's interminable stretch of road.

And if it were actually happening--if the company were actually at risk of being taken out by their own artillery--Nate wouldn't stop her. 

Nate couldn't let his pack be killed like that. He wouldn't.

Griego crowded up, snarling at him to square his men away, but Nate couldn't let himself hear that too clearly, either, though the company XO ought to be coming through loud and clear via the pack-sense. Bo must be filtering for him, Nate thought. He was locked down so tightly himself that he felt cold, as if he was holding out even the sun.

Nate whirled to face Schwetje again, running across the short distance between them. If he could just stop it from getting to that point, if he could stop this before Bo had to do anything drastic, before he himself committed actual mutiny--

"Sir," Nate said, slapping his hand down on the radio handset, halting Schwetje from raising it. 

Yellowjacket gave a confused sort of growl from somewhere off to one side, but neither he nor Schwetje pushed Nate away, and Nate took ruthless advantage of the opening. "Tell me exactly what you're doing."

It was an order, and as such it was rank insubordination. Schwetje obeyed it anyway. "I'm calling in a fire mission on a hunter-killer RPG team."

Nate shook his head, desperate to be heard, to be clear, but he didn't dare open up the pack-sense enough to share the memory of taking them out not five minutes earlier. "There is no RPG team. I called it in, my men destroyed it."

Schwetje's certainty still came through loud and clear to Nate: he wasn't concerned with some other phantom RPG team somewhere else. Schwetje was going to destroy _this_ RPG team, here, now. The fact that he was entirely mistaken about the existence of said RPG team didn't enter into it. 

He was going to do it. He was going to call in an artillery strike, and Nate was going to commit the fucking mutiny of getting Bo to help him coordinate moving the entire company five hundred meters away from the strike zone as fast as they fucking could, and then he was going to prison, and Bo was going to a wolf preserve, and he would never see her again. It didn't matter. It had all been chosen for them. They would do nothing less than everything they could to keep their men and wolves alive. 

Nate felt strangely weightless, as well as cold, and his voice came out sounding serious but impossibly calm. "Sir, I'm merely trying to pass you accurate information. There is no hunter-killer RPG team."

He took his hand off the radio. He couldn't actually stop his CO from doing anything. He could only choose his own actions, and give way to Bo's. He kept himself locked down. He couldn't let this slip one second beforehand, and he had to be absolutely sure.

Nate asked one last time. "What is your order, sir?"

Schwetje stood utterly still, not backing away from Nate but not forcing Nate to back off either. "I'm calling in a fire mission," he said, and Nate didn't think it was only his half-dissociated calm that made it seem that Schwetje spoke slowly, deliberately. He seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation even if he showed no sign of knowing what Nate was about to do. 

Schwetje went on, ponderously. "At Papa Quebec 0-5-9 0-9-8 0-3-8 degrees. Two hundred meters."

Nate crashed suddenly to earth, feeling gravity weighing him down in every bone and muscle, the heat suddenly oppressive. He was suddenly aware of the sweat that soaked his entire body under his MOPP suit.

"Aye aye, sir," Nate choked out, and headed back toward the Humvees.

It wasn't going to happen. There was no danger of a fire mission. He pushed the thoughts of desperate last resorts down, sealing them away with everything else he must not think about, and reached for Bo. _It's okay, let Bryan and Lovell back in. And me._

Nate was instantly inescapably aware of Griego's fury at his insubordination, contrasting with Schwetje's still-unruffled determination as he attempted to call in the fire mission. 

_It's all right, nothing's going to happen_ , Nate told her. _He'll try, but it won't work. Nothing's coming_.

"Sir?" Lovell said, coming to his side as Nate strode steadily away. "Should we--"

"No need," Nate said, not letting him finish the question, just pushing the fact through the pack-sense. Captain Schwetje had the grid designations completely wrong. He could call all he wanted, but there wouldn't be a fire mission, nor a mutiny. Not today.

* * *

As the evening briefing was breaking up, Godfather said, without audible emphasis but with a tug through the pack-sense nearly sharp enough to put Nate on his knees, "Lieutenant Fick."

Nate and Bo stepped forward, both of them standing at attention. 

Godfather and Capo just stood there, watching them, as the tent cleared. Even Sixta left, and Nate felt the pack-sense link through the chain of command turn sharp and bright with the intensity of Godfather's narrow focus on him. 

"I've received word about your actions today," Godfather said. If the words were ambiguous, the stern disdain he communicated through the pack-sense was anything but. Whatever Godfather had heard, it didn't incline him to any kind of sympathy with Nate's actions. Nate could feel Bo determinedly standing tall through the impulse to bow to Capo; he kept his own chin up.

"I'm sure you're aware of the regs regarding proper obedience to orders and respect for your commanding officer," Godfather said. "And you're bright, so I'm sure you know how to argue with every single one, which you will have a chance to do if charges are brought against you."

Godfather left a silent space this time, and a space in the pack-sense as well, waiting for Nate to fill it.

"Yes, sir," Nate said, making no pre-emptive argument or defense. _If charges are brought_ , he'd said, which meant they hadn't been brought yet. Which also meant, the time to defend himself was not now, and he'd only irritate Godfather further if he tried.

Godfather watched him and then nodded, looking satisfied, so Nate guessed he could tell that Nate had taken his point.

"I don't need to tell you we don't have time for this, Lieutenant. _I_ don't have time for this." Godfather waved his hand, and through the pack-sense Nate received his various meanings: not this discussion, and not Nate slowing things down by arguing with his CO's orders. 

"We must keep the initiative. We must control the tempo. And we means _me_ , Lieutenant, not my platoon commanders. You stop to argue with your company commander, you slow him down, you slow the whole battalion down, you interfere with the plan General Mattis has for us. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," Nate repeated.

"Good," Godfather said. "So we're going to get this over with."

Nate felt a sudden cold spike of fear, the first to cut through his dull hot righteous anger, carefully banked but ever-present.

"Captain Schwetje expressed concern that your undue caution arose from a particular concern for one man's safety," Godfather said. 

Nate opened his mouth at that, but the instinct to protest ran aground on the tangle of arguments he wanted to make (didn't, at all, want to have to speak aloud, because it would mean he'd already shattered everything). Schwetje, he realized, must have caught some echo of Nate's desperate persuasion to Bo, to keep her away from his argument with his CO. His fear of _losing_ Brad to politics and punishment, Schwetje had somehow interpreted as a fear of losing him to an artillery strike--as if Nate would put one man above any other, or above all, when it came to live fire.

Nate swallowed the unanswerable question of whether he might be tempted to: he wouldn't. Brad wouldn't let him, for starters.

"Sir," Nate said, after a slack-jawed hesitation.

Godfather tilted his head, and the tent flap was pushed open behind Nate; he felt Godfather's focus narrow, and his own attention broadened just enough to perceive Sixta and his brother escorting Brad and Frost into the tent. Nate gritted his teeth and consoled himself that at least Schwetje wasn't here.

Bo, at his side, stood still as stone, but her presence in his mind was an almost palpably trembling fury, which seemed to buzz in the bones of his skull at a resonance which would crack them apart if it kept up for long. _What is happening? I did as you said--they gave him to us--_ Godfather _gave them to us--I obeyed_ \--

 _My fault_ , Nate thought, desolation beginning to sink into his brain, numbing him even to Bo's frustrated rage. _I didn't control myself. I made them angry._

They would consider this a lesser punishment, reassigning Brad. Nate wouldn't suffer the indignity of losing his command--he would simply have the heart of that command torn out.

Godfather turned away and came back with two sheets of paper. "Sit, both of you. There--there."

Nate sat on a crate at the front of the little ranks left in the tent after the briefing. Brad sat down behind him, near the door, and Frost settled at his feet. They were out of reach, as icily closed off in the pack-sense as ever, and Nate dared not look back. Bo, absorbing his sense of desperate restraint in the face of disaster, lay down at his feet, keeping Nate's body and the crate he perched on between herself and Frost. Her ears gave her away, though, listening greedily for the minute sounds of man and wolf: she took in every breath, every rustle of a MOPP suit.

Godfather handed off a sheet to Sixta and slapped the other down onto Nate's knee.

It was the form to add a man and wolf to an exclusion list.

"I have heard no accusations of an improper relationship between the two of you," Godfather said. 

Nate didn't look up, transfixed by the sheet of paper.

"But if either of you has a personal attachment which will be prejudicial to good order going forward, now is the time to get out from under it. I'm giving you one free chance to fix this, right now. After today, if I have to spend one more minute dealing with problems due to this, I will decide how to handle it. Am I clear?"

Nate closed his eyes. He could keep Brad in the platoon, then. As a hostage to Nate's good behavior, and his obedience to Captain Schwetje.

On the other hand, this also meant that Godfather didn't know that this wasn't a merely human attachment--if he had any idea how close Nate had been to unleashing Bo into outright mutiny, claiming her mate and taking de facto command of the wolfthreat, he would not be simply offering Nate the option of removing Frost from Bo's reach.

And yet--it hadn't come to that. Nate had looked over the precipice and not fallen off, and in that instant, with the lives of the company on the line, he'd been willing to do it if he had to. If this was the leadership they were going to war with, if anything like it happened again--

Nate didn't let himself finish the thought. The _premeditation_. But he scrawled across the provided lines and boxes _No change requested_. 

He stood and handed the page back to Godfather, and behind him Brad stood and stepped forward. Nate didn't have to read the words Brad had written; they were, like his own, few and oriented pointedly sideways to the form's instructions.

"Fine," Godfather said shortly, as though he had expected no other outcome. "Get out of here, gentlemen, and be fucking sure you don't show up in front of me like this again."

"Sir," Nate agreed, Brad's voice matching his. 

They walked out of the tent together, and Nate finally risked a glance over at Brad. He was staring straight ahead, with a look of utmost concentration. Nate couldn't ask Brad if he was sure about this--they'd made that decision when they'd had the chance, and Brad had made it again just now, the same as Nate had. Whatever his calculations had been, they'd arrived at the same choice.

"On the bright side," Brad said into the silence, still a hundred meters out from the area where second platoon had bedded down. "This would seem to indicate you're _not_ being relieved of command."

Because of course that possibility had been circulating through the pack-sense since about thirty seconds after Nate walked away from Schwetje this afternoon.

Nate shrugged provisional agreement. "Charges have not been brought at this time. If and when they are, I am assured I will have the opportunity to respond to any allegations."

He kept it out of the pack-sense, how thin an assurance he knew that to be, but it escaped in his voice all the same.

"Sir," Brad said, stopping but not turning toward Nate. 

Nate halted at his side and gazed off toward third platoon, keeping Brad in his peripheral vision. 

"Your leadership is the only thing I have absolute confidence in," Brad said firmly, and while he remained as coldly separate in the pack-sense as ever, Nate couldn't mistake the warm certainty of the words. 

He smiled a little, involuntarily, and when Brad did look over Nate met his eyes. 

"I won't do anything to jeopardize that," Brad went on. 

Nate could tell Brad was all but jumping up and down screaming _this means something important_ , but Nate didn't know what. Still, he trusted Brad, and he believed that Brad would do whatever was necessary to navigate their precarious position. 

Nate nodded. "I know."

Brad nodded back and set out again toward the platoon. 

Nate caught the edge of some burst of communication through the pack-sense from Brad to Ray, and had about ten seconds to wonder what part of this Brad needed so urgently to convey to his RTO. 

Then Ray appeared, pelting toward them with Navi running at his side. Nate sidestepped automatically as Ray flung himself at Brad, and Brad caught him, grabbing Ray by the thighs to hoist him up into a frantic-looking kiss.

Nate fell back another step, staring, and automatically grabbed Bo by the scruff.

But when he looked down Bo was watching Frost, who had casually bowled Navi over and was trotting away in an elaborate show of disinterest in his brother's behavior. 

Ray had started muttering passionate-sounding words to Brad; only Nate was close enough to hear that they were a long, meandering windup to _stupid, obvious motherfucker_ , which Ray punctuated with another kiss. 

Bo could hear and smell the playacting, even if the purpose of it was beyond her, and Nate hardly even needed the confirmation of her senses. He'd known Brad and Ray long enough. If they'd been interested in each other in this way the whole platoon would have known it a long time ago. Ray had a girlfriend at home, whose sexual appeal he was prone to praise at great and slightly defensive length--Nate, as a bitch's brother, understood how that could go. Outside the inescapable pull of the post-hunt celebration, Nate wasn't aware that Ray had ever paired off with any of the guys in the platoon. 

And Brad, Nate realized, had been entirely solitary since he joined the platoon, except for the hunt and the heat-shack. Except for Nate himself.

Nate turned and walked away, not bothering to watch the rest. He didn't let himself think about what it meant, that there had been no one else for Brad, that Brad and Ray had apparently had this contingency ready to give them some cover. 

No one else in the platoon was any more fooled than Nate. But Nate didn't have to look around to know that Schwetje and Griego were standing twenty meters behind him, and the next story they carried to Godfather was that much less likely to involve Nate's hopeless fixation on Brad.

* * *

Nate could always reach out and find the men of his platoon through the pack-sense. Even Brad, who gave the least away, was always a waking or sleeping presence, his location readily determined in the twenty-two-point triangulation of the wolves scattered across their camp.

That night, lying in his grave and counting over his men and wolves like a rosary, trying to ease himself into sleep, Nate knew as soon as anyone did that Ray and Brad's charade extended beyond mere kisses. He knew when they settled into a grave together, and when Frost and Navi trotted away from One Alpha's vehicle to find less irritating places to sleep. Nate knew the rest of Team One knew, and that all of them--from faintly disappointed Walt to avidly fascinated Trombley to nervously curious Evan to Tony's half of the team keeping a studious distance--were united in guarding the quiet bit of comfort Brad and Ray were sharing.

Nate knew, perhaps better than anyone, how little a charade it actually was. He felt the iciness of Brad's presence in the pack-sense thaw a little, growing less cold, less brittle, less rigidly alone. Whatever his usual preferences, Ray was content, too. His presence in the pack-sense turned warm and still and sleepily expansive as he collapsed into boneless sleep, quieter on every level than he'd been in weeks. Navi returned as soon as they were finished, laying herself down more or less on top of Ray in the grave. Frost stayed away, restlessly patrolling.

Nate opened his eyes and stared up at the stars, trying to move on to Team Two, but his attention and Bo's were mutually, miserably riveted. With Navi's unquestioning cooperation they could hear Brad and Ray's mingled, easy breathing, louder than their own. Nate and Bo were both breathing with careful shallowness, betrayed only by the puffs of steam that rose above them.

Mike loomed up, blocking out a patch of stars; he said nothing aloud, only pushed a diffident question through the pack-sense, not at Nate but at Bo. She huffed assent and scrambled up and out of the grave, setting out at a trot in the opposite direction from Frost's patrol.

Nate rolled onto his side, putting his back to Mike, and listened to the quiet but unmistakable sounds of Mike stepping into the grave and lowering himself down in Bo's place. Nate shut his eyes and felt every vibration, every brush of Mike's body against his through all the impenetrable layers of uniforms and MOPP suits. 

By the time Mike's arm settled over him Nate was waiting for it. When Mike's forehead pressed gently against the back of his head Nate opened his eyes and watched the shadowed dirt, making himself breathe slowly and wait.

"Nate," Mike said quietly. "You shouldn't be alone either."

Nate nodded slightly, and the strategic logic of it flashed through his mind--better to be doubly safe from suspicion, better to be seen in a relationship with Mike while Brad was with Ray--along with the abashed knowledge that that wasn't at all what Mike meant.

"Well, that too," Mike said wryly. "But mostly I mean being fucking lonely and miserable is going to start interfering with your combat effectiveness sooner or later, and that is in fact why you've got me," Mike tugged him pointedly a little closer. "Sir."

"Gunny," Nate agreed, equally ironic, and set his arm over Mike's. 

Mike was open enough to Nate that Nate couldn't mistake this for obligation or calculated self-interest. Mike understood, and didn't want Nate to suffer with this more than he had to. The fact that all the rest of the logic aligned on this came second. It would give a good appearance; lieutenants were allowed, even expected, to lean on their platoon NCOs, no less in this than in anything else. It would make Nate that much likelier to get through this war without losing his shit or being removed from command, either of which would leave a hell of a mess for Mike to deal with. 

"One point of critique," Nate said, and Mike made a slightly skeptical inquiring noise.

Nate pushed Mike's arm away and Mike scooted back--as far as was possible in the confines of the grave--while Nate turned over. Looking him in the eye in the starlight, Nate said quietly, "Don't go giving me chances to close my eyes and pretend you're someone else."

Mike snorted and shook his head and didn't say it out loud. _You know him too well for that._

Nate tried to smile and tried to hold back memory; the effort of it hurt in a suddenly sharp, clear way. It would be so much easier to only want the kind of companionship he'd had before, the friendship Mike was offering, and not--

Mike muttered, "Hell, kid," and pulled him closer again, tangling their legs together and letting Nate hide by pressing too close for eye contact. 

Nate clung to him, taking comfort in the embrace, such as it was--chilly and armored except where their faces touched and breath mingled. Mike's hand ran up and down his back, reaching up to the back of his neck, rubbing over the short fuzz of his hair. Nate ducked his head down under the touch, letting go of even the semblance of officer's dignity here, with Mike, where and while he could.

 _Yes_ , Nate pushed through the pack-sense, in case it wasn't obvious in the grip of his hands and the press of his entire MOPP-suited body. _Please_.

He wasn't sure what he was asking for, exactly. He was worn out and about as far from wanting sex as he'd ever been, but he wanted this closeness and wanted to be closer still, wanted to actually have both of Mike's arms around him and his skin touching Mike's. It was some kind of inverse of the heat-shack, something necessary but without that usefully overwhelming drive to tell him how to satisfy the need.

"Stop thinking," Mike said quietly. "Go to sleep. This ain't the heat-shack, there aren't any required activities."

But Nate wanted one thing entirely clear; he pulled back just far enough to touch his mouth to Mike's, kissing him firmly, deliberately. Mike's hand settled at the back of Nate's neck, holding him there, kissing back a promise: they were together in this. 

"Okay," Nate agreed, when he broke away. He rested his forehead against Mike's and followed Mike's steady breathing down. He was dimly aware of Bo coming back from wherever she'd gone to lie cuddled up with Ash under the Humvee, her ears still cocked for the sound of Frost pacing across the sand.

* * *

Nate seized his opportunity when Brad went off to take a shit; that guaranteed a good ten minutes when he and Ray wouldn't be attached at the hip. Nate pinged Ray as he got out of his own vehicle, and Ray met him out near the berm, equidistant between their Humvees. Navi was lounging back at One Alpha's vehicle with Frost. Bo was pacing down the line of vehicles. Nate and Ray stood alone, staring out into the desert.

The whole platoon had woken up knowing where Mike and Nate had slept, as surely as they knew what Brad and Ray had been up to. There was going to be a flurry of So You've Started Sleeping With Someone In Your Platoon debriefs--the battalion XO had already told Nate to meet him later, and Mike and Brad would both be hearing from Sixta. Ray would normally have been Mike's responsibility, but under the circumstances Nate suspected Mike would pass that off to Lovell. It was in no way Nate's responsibility to talk to Ray about it--Nate was in fact the last person who should officially talk to Ray about sleeping with Brad--but he had to check in with him anyway.

Nate folded his arms over his chest and rocked slightly away from Ray--giving ground without it being taken, being as diffident as he could, as a platoon commander to an E-4 in the light of day. 

"You're a good friend," Nate said, because he had no right to say _thank you_.

Ray snorted. "Yeah, it's a huge sacrifice, sir."

Nate smiled but didn't answer out loud, and held himself still in the pack-sense.

"Anyway, it's my turn," Ray went on, not quite as blithe in the pack-sense as his words sounded in the air. "Brad's been my guy after every one of my Mike Bravos, you know? It's nice being the one who's not fucking wrecked."

Nate's mouth curled up in a smile that felt a little bit like a snarl, but he didn't look over at Ray and he didn't relax at all in the pack-sense. After a minute he said neutrally, "I'm sure it must be."

There wasn't really anything else to say; there had never been anything it was Nate's place to say to begin with, and yet he'd had to do this, for Ray and for Brad. He also had to be seen doing it by the rest of the platoon and the rest of the battalion. He clapped his hand briefly to Ray's shoulder and then turned and walked away.

"Hey, yeah," Ray called after him. "Good talk, LT!"

This time when Nate smiled it almost felt real.

* * *

Two hours after they'd secured the airfield--such as it was--Nate was at the company command vehicle with Captain Schwetje and his fellow platoon commanders, working out the logistics of their supply situation. Whatever else it represented, the lost supply truck was precisely the sort of challenge that Nate's CO was an expert in dealing with. In a quiet tent, with an inventory list and an outline of the battalion's requirements for the immediate future, Schwetje made confident, decisive--and, as far as Nate could tell, entirely correct--plans for how to handle the necessary rationing of MREs and ammunition.

Nate for the most part observed quietly, trying to absorb both the practical lesson in making do and a firm impression of his CO's competence, even if it was also an excellent demonstration of why the man belonged well behind the front lines. Nate was remotely aware of some disturbance at the airfield's perimeter--Frost, ever patrolling, had spotted whatever it was first. Frost also instantly categorized it as _not a threat_ , so Nate didn't think anything of it.

A few minutes later, however, contact from Doc Bryan came through the pack-sense with the focus and impact of a bullet. _Two kids shot. We need the battalion surgeon, they need to be cas-evaced._

 _On it_ , Nate sent back, even as he said aloud, "Sir, excuse me, my corpsman is asking for the battalion surgeon."

Schwetje looked up, faintly worried, and Nate could feel him reaching through the pack-sense to check Nate's platoon, as if he could have missed one of them being badly hurt or dangerously ill.

Nate shook his head. "Iraqis."

Schwetje nodded, satisfied, and went back to working out quantities and contingencies, entirely dismissing the matter. Nate turned on his heel and headed toward battalion HQ. He reached out to the battalion surgeon, Aubin, as he went, pushing Bryan's observations of the boys and their injuries through the pack-sense.

Aubin was already in the tent with Godfather when Nate got there; Nate stepped just inside and stopped, making himself small and unobtrusive physically as well as in the pack-sense. 

"Sir," Aubin was saying, "the boy has abdominal wounds--from a 556. Marines did this, and we need to cas-evac him."

Bo slipped in through the door of the tent and sat down almost behind Nate's leg, united with him in wanting to avoid Godfather's attention for as long as they could.

"Not possible," Godfather replied flatly. "We're thirty klicks out from the nearest Marines. No cas-evac. Civilians are on their own."

"Sir," Aubin said helplessly, and his brother at his side openly whined in distress.

Godfather just shook his head and turned away, and even without being the focus of his attention Nate could feel the finality of the decision through the pack-sense. Aubin, ignominiously dismissed, turned away and spotted Nate, shooting a bleak commiseration on that answer through the pack-sense. They left the tent together, Bo darting ahead while Aubin's brother stayed on his heels. 

They went together--for what good they could do--to the place where the boys were being tended to. Stinetorf, Stafford, and Christeson were all assisting Doc Bryan with first aid. Meesh stood to one side, speaking to a few obviously distraught relatives, and Evan--of course--was watching in quiet, anxious perplexity.

As Nate walked up, he heard Meesh explaining that they didn't know exactly where the boys had been when they were shot--they were shepherds, and had been out tending camels. Somewhere in the free-fire zone, obviously. Stafford's recognition quickly zipped through the pack-sense to Christeson and Stinetorf and Doc, as well as up to Nate. Everyone knew Trombley had taken a shot and killed a camel--it must have been Trombley who shot these kids. 

Nate looked down at Bo, wondering if she would want to try to lock the information away, but she was edging closer to the boy who'd been gut-shot, all her attention on the suffering child. Bryan paid her no attention as she crowded up next to Miller; he was rattling off the child's status to Aubin and reiterating the need for the cas-evac.

Nate stepped in to speak before Aubin had to. "Godfather's denied the request to cas-evac the boy."

Bryan's simmering anger flared, though there was no hint of surprise. "Well, we need to cas-evac him, or he's dead."

Bo whined aloud this time the way Aubin's brother had before, and she looked up at Nate. _Pup_.

Nate winced. He'd been trying his best not to think about that, but Bo was a mother, less than two weeks out from the loss of her children, and she couldn't think of it any other way. These were children--hurt and suffering children. Here was their mother, their family, frantic for them, desperate enough to bring them to the wolf-bonded Americans, the unclean invaders who had shot these boys in the first place. Bo couldn't close herself off from their distress any more than she could ignore the crying of her own pups. And what Bo couldn't ignore, Nate couldn't ignore either; her maternal reaction to these children was as visceral and compelling as heat, if less physically disruptive.

Aubin turned away to go try again with Godfather, and Brad materialized at Nate's side. Nate closed his hands into fists to keep from reaching out to him for support or comfort. Brad had already caught the platoon's certainty that Trombley had done this. He pushed an account of it to Nate, a perfectly controlled burst of memory and information through the pack-sense.

Trombley had called out to Brad that he'd spotted someone, asking Brad's approval to fire; no one else in the platoon would have bothered with verbal confirmation, but Trombley had been cautious since the jinx, anxious to be sure Brad approved of any and every little thing he did. Brad hadn't been able to see what Trombley was looking at, either physically or through the pack-sense, since Trombley's connection to the pack-sense was as tenuous as ever. Brad had been distracted, hadn't pressed Trombley for details, and had cleared him to take the shot.

At these children, these little pups. Nate's stomach turned, and he fought down the sensation.

In a quiet voice that didn't hide his horror and self-recrimination, no matter how cold he stayed in the pack-sense, Brad asked, "What can I do?"

Bryan spared a glance up; he was as aware as Nate was of Brad's part in this, even if he hadn't been the target of Brad's pack-sense confession. "Not a fucking thing, apparently, Brad."

Aubin returned, and the reiterated negative was obvious all over his face and the pack-sense, not needing to be spoken. 

Bo was straining toward the boy; so far she was remembering the prohibition against touching locals, but she was desperate to comfort him somehow. She could hear his weakly racing heartbeat, could smell his pain and distress. Brad stood like a pillar, witnessing this and accepting Bryan's judgment, while Bryan continued to tend to a child he wouldn't be allowed to save. 

Nate couldn't let this furious despair take over and spread out to the rest of the platoon--a significant portion of which was already here and succumbing to it. He also couldn't distinguish Bo's reaction from his own, and either way he couldn't bear to just let this happen, for her sake, for his own, for Brad and Bryan and his whole platoon. Even for Trombley, oblivious though he was. 

"There's gotta be something we can do."

Aubin frowned down at the kid, and Nate could barely feel him through the pack-sense, whether because he was locked down or because all of HQ was inaccessible to him right now. "Under the rules, we have to provide him with care until he dies."

Bryan snapped, "Yeah, so?"

Aubin pushed it through the pack-sense to all of them in a vivid cascade of possible consequences: if Aubin was providing care for the child--the children--then they would be at his billet, alongside the battalion commander. Godfather would be next door to the dying children and their distraught relatives, and that might be enough to make him change his order. Capo wouldn't be able to help being intimately aware of the boys' conditions at that range.

Assent raced through the men without direction or source, all of them collectively latching on to a possible solution like drowning men to a lifeline. The wolves grasped only that there was a chance of saving the children and were instantly, if helplessly, galvanized. _Yes, yes, yes_.

Nate was as drawn in by the plan as anyone, feeling the chance of saving the boys like a breath of air after too long underwater. He stepped back as his men formed up to carry the stretchers; Bo eagerly pushed the pack-sense into perfect coordination, so they lifted the boys as smoothly and gently as one man carrying a newborn. There was no need to clear a path, but the wolves as well as Nate and the other men who weren't needed for carrying formed up around the worse-injured boy and his bearers as a kind of honor guard, escorting them to the door of Godfather's tent.

Sixta stepped out a bare second after they arrived. He didn't shout or bluster; he gave them a sweeping look, probed swiftly and effectively through the pack-sense and then said aloud, though he must already know, "What the hell is going on here?"

Before Nate--or Aubin--could offer an answer, Bryan stepped up. "We brought him here to die."

Nate stepped up between Brad and Aubin, closing ranks, as Sixta gave another sweeping look and said in a quiet tone that did not admit the possibility of resistance, "Get him the fuck out of here."

Nate stepped back at once, giving Stafford a push through the pack-sense and waving him off. Stafford nodded and led the others into the shade of another tent, their wolves trotting along with them. Nate returned to the line between Brad and Aubin, with Doc on Brad's other side. Bo placed herself before Nate, the only wolf present since Frost had made himself scarce before Brad showed up, and Bryan and Aubin's wolves were monitoring the boys. 

Bo stood tall, righteously determined to do her part in this dimly-understood maneuver to get help for the children. She trusted the rest of her platoon to look after them for this moment, though she remained acutely conscious of their conditions. Nate's own shoulders straightened in echo of her. They would do the right thing.

Godfather stepped out of the tent, his lips tightening as he glanced from Nate to Brad before widening the sweep of his gaze.

For the first time it occurred to Nate what they were doing--not just the appearance but the fact of this, himself and Brad standing shoulder to shoulder in united defiance of orders. It hadn't yet been even twenty-four hours since Godfather had given them a last chance not to be reassigned or disciplined.

Godfather didn't speak to them directly, asking Sixta what they were doing, giving Nate a moment more to realize fully that he was about to lose his command--lose Brad, at least--over this, and that it hadn't occurred to him to even consider that risk. He was glad it hadn't. He was glad that he wasn't the least bit tempted now--with Brad at his side, with Bryan's fury almost palpable in the air and burning in the pack-sense, with Bo standing tall before him, with his men tending the boys--to back down before that danger.

Godfather looked them all over. "You're requesting that I send this wounded civilian to the RCT for aid," he said, not a question, and then began to explain the impossibility of it in tactical terms.

Nate put his chin up, saying nothing, asking nothing, demanding nothing, only holding the line. They had been forbidden to keep the child here before Godfather to change his mind. They had not been forbidden to stand here themselves. If this was all they could do, he knew every man with him would do it. Even--especially--Brad, who blamed himself for this and needed to make it right.

Brad, Nate knew, wouldn't flinch from this any more than he would, any more than either of them would have deserted under fire. A child had been hurt, and they had to help him; it was a purer, more logical mission than any they'd had yet, and they would accomplish it no matter what casualties they suffered in the process. Nate didn't have to reach out for Brad, didn't even have to look at him, to know they were united in this.

Godfather's explanation came to its unacceptable conclusion: cas-evac wasn't their responsibility and wasn't possible even if they wanted to try. They all still stood there, waiting. Nate tried not to expect anything, or fear anything.

Godfather turned to Eckloff, his XO, and said, "Get me Captain Patterson."

Nate didn't move, didn't blink, didn't tense. If he was going to call in Patterson--call in Athena and Alpha Company to put down a mutiny--then this was it. Nate still refused to flinch. If this was the hill his career had to die on, so be it. If they took Bo from him, it would still be better than letting her see him back down on this. They could not abandon these children.

There was a quiet radio exchange between Eckloff and Patterson, and Godfather turned toward them again and said, with no change of inflection from his previous refusals, "I'm dispatching an Alpha platoon to take this child to the shock-trauma unit."

 _There. Godfather will save the children_ , Nate pushed at Bo and the platoon, fiercely, before triumph could get the better of anyone. He turned toward Brad as he broke ranks, and Brad turned in toward him.

Their eyes met, and though Brad was held tight and distant in the pack-sense, Nate could see it on him for an instant. Brad had been as aware as he'd been of what they'd risked--what they still risked every moment, if they dared to show anything now, in relief or vindication. 

They exchanged a nod and walked away, keeping an arm's length apart as they went.

* * *

Nate knew that he could only get away with pushing things so many times--not only would he wind up disciplined or having Brad and Frost transferred away, but every time he defied proper authority he made it that much easier for Bo to decide that he and she really ought to be in charge. Nate dared not give her any encouragement toward mutiny.

And anyway, they were Marines. Nate and Bo were in Iraq to follow orders and execute the objectives their command assigned to them. Nate couldn't refuse those orders just because they put his men and wolves in danger--not even when he had reason to believe he was taking his platoon into an ambush. And if he wasn't going to refuse the order, then he had no right to question the order, or to encourage his men to question it either, or to give them room to suspect that he would sympathize with their grumbling. 

It didn't matter how little he liked the way Brad--and the rest of his TLs--had looked at him like he was the enemy. He'd done what he had to do. He'd passed on the orders Bravo Two had been given, and he was taking them across the bridge into Muwaffaqiyah.

Despite all the reasons it was unavoidable and necessary, Nate had a sick squirming feeling in his gut as they rolled toward the bridge. The pack-sense of the platoon felt less united than Nate could ever remember it being. Every team, every vehicle, was already hunkered down defensively, shutting out the rest of the platoon--and Nate and Bo--as much as possible as they braced for the shitshow they all knew was coming.

The wolves were all physically hunkered down--tucked into their armored boxes in each Humvee for protection against gunfire--which didn't help. The less the wolves could sense each other in mundane ways, by ears and nose, the harder it was to coordinate the pack-sense. Bo, despite the orders she and Nate had pushed to every other wolf in the platoon to stay down and stay safe, lay halfway into Nate's lap, her ears pricked. She was just waiting for the moment when she would be able to snap the pack-sense into alignment. Even she couldn't force the platoon into pack-sense synchronicity when they were resisting her like this; she could only reach out to them, making it possible. The best she could hope for was a burst of combat that would make them reach for the pack-sense and allow her to coordinate them like before.

They all came to a halt at the bridge; Nate could feel Ray's frustration through the pack-sense and nothing from Brad--

And then Brad suddenly pushed his perceptions out to everyone, clear and sharp as if the pack-sense had never been fractured. _There are men in the trees._

The shooting started in the next instant, and even Bo ducked down as the bullets started spraying in all directions. Trapped inside the Humvees, the firing of their own weapons would nearly deafen the wolves, blocking them from usefully triangulating the sounds of incoming fire. There was a confusion of chatter over the radio, and even as Nate covered his sector, firing into the trees, he was reaching for the pack-sense, trying to make sense of what his men were doing. 

Bo, curled down into her box, was reaching out frantically, but under fire the already-disjointed teams had only withdrawn further into themselves. They'd finally taken to heart Nate's instructions from back at Matilda, every team looking after its own--which meant no one was coordinating the teams, and no one was going anywhere, despite Ray's growing frustration. Ray actually ventured outside his Humvee to yell slightly more effectively--which was still to no effect at all--before Frost leaned out the door and hauled him back in.

The half-dislocated feeling of his teams not quite aligned was suddenly shattered by Team Two going abruptly _blank_ in the pack-sense, dropping from Nate's awareness entirely. Bo surged up, letting out a startled, anxious howl that blocked Nate from hearing more than the steady cadence of Pappy's voice as he checked in over the radio.

Nate grabbed the handset. "Hitman Two Two, this is Hitman Two, what is your status? I say again, what is the status of your man down? Over."

Even as he said it he could feel Team Two reconnecting, and realized that it must have been Pappy himself who was injured; the momentary shock of the injury would have knocked Pappy out of the pack-sense and momentarily cut off the whole team downstream of him from Nate. No other team member's injury would have affected them that way. 

Sure enough, Pappy's voice came back, "I've been hit in the foot. Break. We'll try a tourniquet. We're returning fire."

Nate looked to the side. Mike wasn't even trying to maneuver the vehicle. There was nowhere to go, and they were sitting ducks here; all the ambushers had to do was keep up a steady rate of fire and more men and wolves would start vanishing from the pack-sense. Next time someone wouldn't come back.

In the hardly-necessary privacy of their pack-sense bond, Nate pushed, _We have to get out of here. Back up!_

Mike shook his head slightly. _Nowhere to go, Nate_. 

The Humvee behind them was too close, the road too narrow. It was a beautifully brutal place for an ambush.

Mike turned his head to shout back at Christeson to guard his sector, and Nate looked down at Bo. 

_We have to do something, or the whole platoon is lost._

Bo understood that arithmetic down to her queen-wolf bones. _Save as many as we can._

Nate nodded, and shot one more glance over at Mike. "Turn it around, we'll be right back!"

Nate shoved the door open and Bo lunged out past him, dropping low to the ground; she would be virtually invisible in the darkness. At the same time Nate felt one little piece of the pack-sense snap perfectly and cleanly into place. Another wolf came out of his Humvee, giving Bo a triangulation point to track the sounds of incoming fire. Frost, up by One Alpha's vehicle, was lying low like she was, accepting the same risks. 

Nate closed his eyes and let the pack-sense guide him unerringly to the rearmost vehicle; he was dimly aware of Mike warning the platoon that he was out on foot and not to shoot him, but Bo's improved vantage was making it easier for her to reach out to the wolves already. The whole platoon had to know where he was as surely as Nate knew their locations. Bo was also supplying Nate with the locations of the ambushers, and what felt like every bullet from both sides; he dodged almost without thought. 

When he reached Team Three, Nate opened his eyes again and realized that Bo had stayed at his side all the way. She lunged up next to Nate, emitting a low growl, and Nate felt Team Three come clear in the pack-sense even as Nate yelled at the driver. "Baptista, turn it around now!"

Baptista looked disbelieving for an instant--as if he believed this were a firefight and not a slow-motion slaughter--and Nate pushed the whole tactical situation to him hard enough to make his head rock back. Baptista nodded understanding and Nate and Bo turned away, dodging bullets as they ducked around their own vehicle--turned and waiting for them, because Mike didn't need any further explanations--on their way up to the next Humvee. 

Team Two was much more rattled in the pack-sense, but Bo hauled them in almost before she'd looked in on them, making Nate immediately, acutely aware of just how badly Pappy's foot was hurt, and how distracted Rudy was by his shieldmate's injury.

"Rudy," Nate yelled, grabbing his shoulder for emphasis even as he pushed the plan through the now-clear pack-sense. "Move up onto the berm, hard right and go."

"Roger that," Rudy yelled back, steadying quickly, and Nate and Bo took off again, one their way to One Bravo.

"Coming around," Nate shouted, approaching Lilley's side of the vehicle from behind, but Bo had already reached through the pack-sense to get Doom on board, and the men made holes in their firing accordingly, letting Nate and Bo reach the driver. "Lilley, up on the berm, hard right, follow Rudy. Go!"

Nate and Bo made one more darting run forward, and Frost circled wide around them as they came, keeping enough distance for the parallax between his ears and Bo's to be useful, since they were still the only wolves outside the Humvees. Bo changed places with him, dodging under the Humvee to come up near Evan while Nate slapped Ray on the shoulder. "Your path should be clear now! Go!"

Navi let out a bright, pleased bark as One Alpha snapped into the pack-sense like the last puzzle piece--Bo gave an equally pleased growl at the still-whole smell and sight of Evan tucked into the back seat--and Nate and Bo took off again, dashing back to their own vehicle, waiting to be last out as the others rumbled past. Nate pushed orders through the pack-sense now, not bothering to wait for the radio as he shoved Bo back into the Humvee and jumped up behind her. _All Victors, push past Bravo Three's position and hold._

When he did grab the radio it was for a specific call. "Two Two, what is Echo Five Papa's status?"

Even knowing, it was an ugly shock to hear Doc Brunny's voice come back instead of Pappy's. "We've stopped the bleeding. He's stable. Break. What's the status of the cas-evac? Over."

"Stand by," Nate called back, and punched the call for cas-evac up through the pack-sense to Schwetje and Aubin simultaneously even as they rolled past Bravo Three. The radio call came in from Lovell, seeing them pass--all Bravo Two victors were back out of the kill zone, without a man or a wolf lost.

Everyone was found, in fact. The pack-sense was back to normal, tight and close and clear, and Nate could feel the adrenaline surging through the whole platoon, reaction lagging a little behind the brief deadly flurry of the ambush. They coasted down the road, past the rest of Bravo, to the comparative safety of the same stretch of road they'd been parked on earlier in the day, well out of range of the bridge and its defenders.

It sank into all of them that they were out of the fight, that they were as safe as they ever were in Iraq and the action was over. There was no knowing who recognized it first, but they all knew it was something like--nothing like--that moment after the hunt. This had been the real thing, the most real danger they'd been in yet: Pappy had been shot, and Stafford was hurt in some way Nate hadn't identified yet, and so was Holsey's brother Sunny. 

But they'd survived it, and now they were all wired in to the same shaky, sharp-edged adrenaline. No one moved first; Nate was shoving off his Kevlar and kissing Mike frantically, his rifle clacking hard against the steering wheel, at the same time he heard the thump and pained noise and hurried rustling noises from the boys in back. Every Humvee was the same, and the wolves all poured out of their hidey-holes to get away from their crazed brothers and stand watch outside. 

Nate would have to deal with all of it soon, the wounded men and the after-action and what the hell had happened on that bridge. Right now, in the wolfish present, he could have this: clumsy, hungry kisses, Mike's hands steadying him, and his pack all around him, brightly, brilliantly alive.

* * *

It was broad daylight by the time the bridge was cleared--LAVs and Bravo Three had laid waste to everything in sight. They were victims of their own success, after; they had to stop and clear the bodies before they could roll through, checking for wounded men among the ambushers they'd killed.

Nate walked with Mike across the bridge they'd been driven back from the night before, with Ash and Bo ranging ahead of them. There was a cluster of men, including Meesh, gathered around a motionless body--not quite dead, judging by the interest they were taking in it. Nate and Mike reached them in time to see Meesh examining the stuff Kocher had cleared from the man's pockets. 

Bravo Three's corpsman, Burke, was assessing him cautiously. Burke's brother was standing over the man's feet, and there was something unusually uncomfortable in the wolf's posture, beyond just the presence of a wounded man. Nate realized why as Bo trotted up close to the man and then stopped short, actually backpedaling a couple of startled steps.

The corpsman glanced toward Bo and then toward the men standing over him. "He's sunder-shocked. He's got a brother here somewhere, just killed."

Bo trotted away while Meesh observed that the man was Syrian, and had entered Iraq a few days after the invasion started. He'd given _jihad_ as his reason for entering the country at passport control, and he'd come in with a wolf at his side. 

Wolfbrothers were relatively rare in Iraq; despite the certainty they'd had back at their first roadblock, they'd only rarely encountered enemy wolves since then. The Republican Guard was wolf-bonded, but most of the insurgents they were fighting weren't. They were ordinary people, holding open the option of returning to an ordinary life--a clean, wolfless, probably Muslim life--after this. But this man hadn't held anything back; he'd bonded to a wolf. He'd handed over his whole life to this fight long before he'd taken part in last night's ambush.

Bo made a wounded noise, and shock and grief reverberated through their bond. Nate made himself stand still but looked around quickly for her, and then was frozen.

Bo had found the jihadi's brother, and was bringing the wolf's body to them. The wolf was covered in enough dried blood that it wasn't obvious at a glance how it had died, other than violently. Its body, which Bo had picked up by the scruff, barely dangled to the ground. It had been old enough to be weaned, and so old enough to bond, but not very much older. Man and wolf couldn't have been bonded more than a few weeks.

Bo carried the pup over to the man's side, and everyone stepped back to let her lay it down. She closed her teeth gently on the jihadi's wrist and laid his hand on his brother; the jihadi took a long, pained breath which needed no interpretation. Bo returned to Nate's side and Nate stood for a moment with her, trying not to think of last year's litter, all with brothers now, who they had last seen when they were only this big, weaned and sent off to boot camp. This pup had a desert coat, like half of Bo's pups; under all that blood he could have a brindle coat like _Oscar Mike_ or her big brother, _sun on salt-rimed stone_. 

This was a pup, somebody's pup, and this dying man's brother. The pup, whoever he'd been, had been bonded to this man while Nate and Bo were in Kuwait, training for the invasion, almost certainly _because_ the Americans had been in Kuwait and training for an invasion. This man had handed over his life and his heart to a wolf just weeks ago, because of them, and had lost him already. The shock of that loss made him even more unlikely to survive his own injuries.

It was simpler than that, in Bo's head. _Pups_. 

These pups, they'd shot on purpose. 

Nate felt something break, and he reached down and grabbed Bo by the scruff--he longed to be able to pick her up in his arms as he hadn't since SOI, since she'd been no more than a pup herself--and towed her away from Godfather and Schwetje and the jihadi and his brother and the other unmoving bodies. At the edge of the river Nate dropped to his knees beside her, burying his face against her neck and letting himself feel what she felt.

_This isn't war. This isn't even a hunt. This is killing children._

Nate nodded against her fur, feeling a yawning, sick despair, guilty and helpless in the face of the machine of war, and then he realized that that was only what _he_ felt about this. What Bo felt was still taking shape, boiling up out of some dark and deep place walled off by Nate's months of efforts to persuade her to deny her instincts.

Wolves were, at heart, simple creatures. When faced with the monstrous, they banded together to destroy the monsters. They had accepted a long time ago that monsters sometimes took the shape of men. While Nate was still reeling at the idea, Bo was gathering herself to do what was necessary: to throw off her polite pretense of obedience to an unconscionable chain of command and call for Frost's support to rally the wolfthreat behind her.

Nate pulled back from Bo and did the first and stupidest thing he could think of, forcing his hand between her teeth. That jolted her into paying attention to him for a second, and that gave him an opening. 

Nate broke all kinds of protocol and pushed an order privately and directly to Brad, almost the same channel in the pack-sense Bo had been about to use to call Frost. _Keep him away from her, I don't care what the fuck you have to do. Don't let this happen._

That was enough. Nate received back Brad's wordless and rock-solid assurance that the order, however impossible, would be followed. With Frost out of the way, Nate focused all his attention on Bo.

 _Don't do this_ , he told her, not stern but certain, as he pressed the softness of his palm down against her teeth. _You cannot do this_.

 _We have to stop them_ , Bo pushed back, not so much furious as certain in the immovable way only a wolf could be. She didn't bite down, but she didn't lower her head or let go, either. _We can't let this happen again. We can't obey them anymore._

Nate couldn't argue with her on her own terms. He couldn't convince her that the pup's death wasn't wrong, or that the chain of command wasn't responsible for the deaths they dealt out. He couldn't persuade her that this one small atrocity, on top of everything else they'd seen, wasn't enough to justify her reaction.

He had to shift the ground; he had to show her what came after. Wolves needed humans for their ability to strategize beyond the moment, to hold the past and future and an array of alternate possibilities in mind. But Nate had to put it in stark, immediate terms. There was very little that would make her change course now, and Nate had to be utterly clear. Wolves didn't listen to possibilities. They didn't have the subjunctive mood. Nate made the thought absolutely declarative.

_I will die._

He pictured it for her, making it as real as he could: the image of himself riddled with bullets by any or all of the men around him. Their own putative side, as soon as Bo began her mutiny. The enemy, who had ambushed them before and would seize on the disruption to regroup and ambush them again, to far greater effect. A firing squad, back home, if he survived to be arrested and convicted. It would be him covered in blood, just like that pup, him cold and dead, waiting for her to find his body.

And at the same time, he showed her the truth underlying those events: himself lying dead at her feet, his blood on her teeth.

_I will die and you will kill me. I will die because of you._

Bo's denial was wordless, crashing over him like the tide. She wouldn't allow it, she would protect him, she would--

 _I will die_ , Nate repeated. _I will die because of you._

He wouldn't abandon her. He was her brother, and he would fight beside her if she forced him to it. He could never stand against her. But there were so many more of them--thousands upon thousands, vast armies beyond the union of any one of the Great Packs--and Bo had no plan, no refuge, no certain allies. Anything she began here and now would end on this same spot, in this same hour, in blood and death and utter futility. If it looked like things were getting truly out of control an artillery strike would simply vaporize them. They would accomplish nothing except more death. 

_I will die_ , Nate pushed at her. _Christeson and Dusty will die. Evan will die. Brad and Frost will die._

Bo's denial froze into horror, and something that felt sickeningly like a loss of nerve. She was conscious for the first time of being afraid of a fight, of having too much to lose to dare to fight where she knew she should. Artillery strikes and Scuds and gas attacks and machine gun fire and one ambush after another hadn't done that to her. Nate had.

Nate didn't move, holding her gaze, letting her teeth press against his skin. He couldn't focus on anything but holding himself under control and so giving her some tenuous thread by which to find her way back.

_We shouldn't, anyway, _Nate offered. _It's the wrong fight. They're not the enemy.___

Nate could feel Bo scrambling desperately for solid ground. _They are. The pup--_

 _His brother was ambushing us_ , Nate reminded her, bringing her back to the night before, the bullets flying in both directions. _I could have fired that shot. Any of us could. We were defending ourselves._

 _But we shouldn't--they shouldn't--_ Nate felt Bo trying to grapple with the complexity of the invasion. It was like watching her trying to walk a tightrope in a tornado. Nate tugged his hand from between her teeth to throw an arm around her again.

 _We can't fight the whole war_ , Nate told her firmly. _We can only protect our pack. We can only make sure our pack is doing the right things._

 _It shouldn't be like this_ , Bo insisted, feeling sure of that part, and Nate couldn't disagree with her.

_Fighting them here isn't how we change that._

_But we will_ , Bo decided, plucking certainty from nowhere and feeling more like herself again than she had since she found that pup. _We will change it._

 _Yes_ , Nate agreed recklessly, anything to give her some little piece of confidence again. _We'll find a way, we'll make a difference. But not yet. For now we follow orders, and we protect our platoon._

Bo huffed slightly impatient agreement and shook off his grip, trotting away to check on Evan and Dusty and Christeson, and then probably every other wolf and man in the platoon. Nate stayed on his knees another few seconds, trying to will away the adrenaline hangover he could feel coming for him.

When a footstep crunched behind him, he popped up to his feet like a jack-in-the-box, recognizing his CO even as he did. Nate schooled his face to blankness as best he could and turned to face Schwetje with his chin up.

Schwetje was frowning after Bo, but he didn't look angry or more concerned than usual. "She okay, Nate?"

Nate wasn't even actually surprised anymore. Bo must have closed herself off from the pack-sense, having the basic tactical sense not to broadcast her intentions. No one would have picked up any of what passed between them, and Schwetje wasn't going to guess.

"Yes, sir. It was hard for her, seeing that pup."

Schwetje nodded, and then turned his attention to Nate and said, with an earnest seriousness that Nate could feel reverberating through the pack-sense, "This is what Godfather's always saying, Nate. Tempo, tempo, tempo. We have to keep moving. Can't be stopping. Can't be looking back. That's the only way to get through."

Nate blinked. Schwetje had just somehow gone all the way through wrong-headed obliviousness and out the other side into something that actually sounded like good advice. Or else Nate had finally reached the state of dazed adrenaline intoxication where everything sounded profound.

"Yes sir," Nate said.

Schwetje reached out and gripped his shoulder. "You're doing a fine job, Nate. Just fine. You hang in there. You know you can always talk to me."

"Yes sir," Nate repeated, and stood very still until Schwetje nodded again and walked away.

Nate struck out in the direction Bo had gone, back over the bridge to find the rest of the platoon.

No. To find Brad. Just this once, Nate couldn't avoid him.

He was easy to find, sitting alone in the shade of Team One's Humvee. Frost was sprawled half in his lap, half out of his MOPP suit; for a moment Nate marveled that Brad had not only kept Frost calm but gotten him to submit to a clipping, and then he realized that Frost wasn't moving at all. Nate could see him breathing--could feel the warm rightness of his presence where it should be in the pack-sense--but he was thoroughly unconscious. Brad's hands, moving in steady patterns over his fur, must be monitoring as much as soothing.

Nate walked over and knelt just on the opposite side of Frost's back legs. Brad didn't look up, just kept running his hand over the fluffy top of Frost's head, down to his short-clipped shoulder, over and over.

"That was it," Brad said finally.

"Yeah," Nate said. "That was it."

Brad nodded, still looking down. "I tranked him," he said, which Nate supposed was obvious. "Been carrying that shit they put in the heat-shack dart guns ever since we stepped off. I got Doc Brunny to give me a dose. It's fuckin' creepy how fast it kicks in."

"Yeah," Nate said. "I remember. They did it to Bo."

Brad did look up at that, and there was something young and unguarded about his expression. He looked down again almost instantly. "Yeah, of course. I just--there are some fights nobody wins, so I figured I'd better cut it short."

Nate nodded, hiding his own wince. Probably neither he nor Bo had won, back there, even if they'd both left on their feet. "Thanks. I should've done something like that myself."

Brad snorted. "Like she wouldn't just come up fighting anyway."

Nate's mouth shaped a smile of agreement. "You can give him the antagonist now. She's thought better of it."

Brad looked up and met his eyes again, and this time he looked Nate over, a quick sweeping glance. "Good work not getting bitten this time."

Nate's smile felt almost sincere this time, and he touched the hand he'd put between Bo's teeth to keep himself from reaching for the scattered scars he'd picked up in the heat-shack. "She thought better of that, too."

Brad's snort sounded almost exactly like Bo's, and Nate made himself stand and turn away as Brad reached into his vest for another syringe.

"Come on, Frosty," Brad murmured, barely loud enough for Nate to hear. "Rise and shine."

Nate didn't look back.

* * *

Bo didn't forget, but once the question of leading a full-scale mutiny was closed, she didn't consider it again. She focused on protecting her pack, to the exclusion of all else. She didn't care about winning anymore; she cared about not losing, always considering their tactics defensively, always on alert for the next source of danger. She was constantly anxious for the platoon, and Nate couldn't do much to keep her mindset from leaking into his, though he tried his best not to show it.

Bo wouldn't sleep while Nate was sleeping, insistent on keeping alert to guard the platoon when he couldn't; she rested only when Nate was awake and on watch. It soon felt like neither of them were sleeping at all--Nate's brief hours of rest were full of dreams of Bo's constant patrolling, and he doubted her sleep was any more restful when he was pacing constantly, watching over the men. 

The men started coming down with dysentery, and a handful of the wolves had infected sores on their shoulders and hips from constantly wearing the MOPP suits. Bo and Nate took shifts monitoring them, and Nate had lost track of whether it was him or Bo who was awake and on watch by the time he found himself standing side by side with her, turning back Team Three--Bo growling and bodily herding the wolves, Nate pushing the men around by their shoulders--from trying to go out into a marsh on Griego's orders to check out a blown up tank. 

Once the men were headed back to their bedrolls with Doc Bryan to watch over them, Nate and Bo went looking for Griego. They didn't have to look far; Griego had been waiting, Nate thought, for exactly this reaction. Nate barely needed Bo's input to sense the smarmy, cunning, I'm-not-quite-lying victory radiating off him as he said, "I was just covering your ass, Lieutenant. You approved this."

Nate thought he remembered it, in the fractured and half-dreamed way he remembered everything from the last few days. Griego had loomed over him, saying something about a tank, making it sound urgent. Nate had thought he was dreaming, that the gluey paralysis that stopped him from getting up to do it himself was a nightmare holding him down, and not merely his own actual exhaustion.

Griego was still standing there, eyeing not Nate but Bo. Nate shot a glance at Griego's brother, Talon, who was even more openly braced for a fight than Griego himself. It occurred to Nate that this might all be an effort to get one or both of them to entirely lose control. Griego had been furious at Nate's insubordination over the danger-close fire mission, and more furious when nothing came of it. He'd love nothing better than to be able to show a bruise or a bite mark to draw down a real court martial. He'd used their men and wolves--ill and in pain as they were--to do it, and if Nate were a little further from falling down in exhaustion himself he might consider the consequences worth the satisfaction.

As it was, Nate just wanted it over with. He glanced over at Bo. _Outflank them._

Bo trotted away, turning her attention to the shattered hulk of the old tank, drawing on the observations of every wolf within reach who wasn't so sick and exhausted as to be uselessly sense-deadened. Team Three, for instance, who would have had to physically walk out to determine what Bo could tell with a flick of her ears.

 _All clear_ , Bo reported back.

"There," Nate said, returning his gaze to Griego. "Bo and I cleared it; there's nothing bigger than a rat living out there and at least ten years' accumulation of rust. Not a threat, Gunny."

Griego looked sour and irritated and Nate leaned in. "You want to see a threat, Gunny, you fuck with my platoon one more time and I will give you a threat to worry about. But for tonight we're done."

Griego gave him a dark look--not defeated, but momentarily thwarted. That was enough for tonight, when Nate was all but swaying on his feet and still not entirely sure he was awake. Bo returned to his side and turned him toward their Humvee.

Doc Bryan and Mike were both waiting for them there, and between the two men and Ash and Miller they crammed Nate and Bo into a grave together. Nate blinked up at the four of them standing sentinel over him and Bo, wondered vaguely if anyone had been close enough to hear what he'd said to Griego, wondered what he was leaking into the pack-sense when he was too tired to control himself. Then he turned his face against Bo's and closed his eyes.

When he woke up Bo was gone. Four hours had passed and Nate felt almost genuinely functional, and he hadn't even sat up before Bo gave him the sitrep, organized by priority. No more men had gotten sick, though Stinetorf, Manimal, and Doc Brunny were all still in bad shape. Two more wolves had been diagnosed with infections and a total of four of them now had the shits from the antibiotics. Bo had slept nearly as long as he had. There was coffee.

Nate nodded to no one and stood up to face another day.

* * *

A few days later they wound up in a POG camp with time on their hands and, even rarer, an opportunity to get out of their MOPP suits. Stripped down to fatigues, Nate felt almost naked, and the wolves, actually naked, were enjoying their freedom even more than the men, bouncing around the disorientingly green and grassy camp like puppies.

Nate tried to sleep, since Bo was running around with the rest of the wolves; she was more than capable of keeping watch for both of them. He lay in the grass beside the command Humvee, getting no further than dozing while Bo worked her way through checking on every wolf in the platoon. She washed up near a supply truck and came to a stop, having run across the rare sight of a woman Marine, perched on top of the crates with her brother. Bo was fascinated by the human female members of the Corps, who were even rarer than female wolves. Nate still hadn't entirely convinced Bo that humans were actually born in even numbers of male and female; she considered his own two sisters a singular accomplishment on his mother's part.

Bo wasn't the first member of Bravo Two to notice the woman Marine; a handful of the men were gathering within earshot of her. None of them would admit to craving female company when they had their shieldbrothers, but some men just couldn't resist gravitating to women. Bo kept a weather eye on them--Nate braced to go and break it up if they made themselves really obnoxious--but the woman Marine showed no signs of distress even to Bo's attentive senses. The guys, after a few volleys of lewd remarks, wound up deciding to show her what she was missing out on, at which point Bo noted that the woman Marine seemed somewhat amused, although her brother betrayed some aggravation. 

Sixta broke it up before any of them got all the way out of their fatigues, so Nate didn't feel too bad about staying put, sinking a little closer to actual sleep, only to be jerked awake ten minutes later by a radio call. He scrambled up and grabbed the handset from Christeson.

"Hitman two actual here."

"This is Hitman," Schwetje said. "Nate, I'm hearing there's some kind of disturbance going on over in your area, do you know what's going on?"

"It's fine, she's gone," Nate said, glancing in the direction where the supply truck had been parked, but even as he did he realized that everyone in the camp was looking the other way. He turned to follow their gazes, and let the handset sag away from his ear.

Brad was running around a field at the other end of their little encampment, stripped to the waist, with his arms out to his sides. At this distance, Nate could see that Brad had his eyes closed, and that he was smiling, but he couldn't make out the meaning of the expression. 

Bo came running up, and Nate saw her stop sharply and then turn and come to sit beside him. She'd been on her way to Evan, who was standing there watching Brad run, but Frost was already sitting at his side. Frost twitched an ear, and Nate knew--and Bo knew even better--that if she went over there Frost would find something important to do elsewhere, but Bo lay all the way down in the grass, pointedly ignoring Brad's spectacle and ceding Frost his place.

Nate turned away too, and realized that Schwetje had abandoned the radio call. Nate returned the handset to Christeson, and waved him away when he tilted his head toward Brad, still running around. Nate could keep watch as well as anyone--better, because he didn't actually want to watch the show.

Once he wasn't looking, it occurred to Nate what was strange about Brad's display. Nate looked back then--not at Brad, but at Evan, who was watching in obvious fascination, notebook in hand, now with Ray and Navi beside him as well as Frost. Nate sat down in the Humvee and closed his eyes.

When he wasn't looking, Nate couldn't tell what was happening over there. If he focused on the platoon's locations he could tell that they were drifting over there, and that Brad himself was moving in erratic loops around the field, but that was all. He couldn't feel anything from Brad, and he was certain that no one else could, either. For all that he was half-naked and running around like he'd been set free, Brad was as coolly hidden in the pack-sense as ever.

Nate wondered for a few seconds how it felt, and then he shut down that train of thought. He picked up the handset and called Schwetje to assure him that everything was fine.

* * *

It was worse for all the wolves when they got into Baghdad, where they were surrounded by civilians. The men could, more or less, wrap their heads around the idea of necessary evils and inevitable side-effects, but the wolves saw only helpless people in need of protection. Bo couldn't walk down a street with Nate without clocking every kid they passed, noting their fear, their injuries, their hunger.

They made what attempts to help they could. Doc set up a makeshift clinic, which led to a near-riot when demand overran supply. And every day saw them moved to a different neighborhood, starting from scratch in trying to understand the needs of people they wouldn't be allowed to stay with long enough to help. The patrols became formal exercises in walking around as ordered without anyone getting shot; the awareness that they would soon be pulled out of Baghdad altogether was everywhere in the pack-sense. Everyone was just counting down.

They came back one day from a patrol to find they'd missed mail call; there were a few envelopes lying on Nate's bedroll. One was from his parents, another from his oldest sister, Jenny. But the last and thickest envelope had an APO return address in Kuwait, and after a frowning moment Nate recognized the name: Staff Sergeant Nameth, whose sister, Victory, was fostering Bo's pups. 

Bo leaped in the air like a pup herself, and Nate couldn't help laughing as he tore open the envelope, spilling out a stack of photos: a closeup of each of the pups and a few group shots. Tactfully, Nameth had left out any pictures with himself or Victory in the frame. 

"They're getting big," Nate said, holding the images in his mind rather than bothering to show the photos directly to Bo. Her memory overlaid them with scent and scent-names, and he thought she paid extra, anxious attention to _peanut butter cookies_. 

Nate scrutinized each picture of the worrisome pup. He was lying on his back in his individual portrait, mouth open in a goofy puppy grin with his tongue lolling out over his milk teeth, pale belly exposed between enormous paws submissively folded down. Some of the group shots seemed more promising for a future Marine: he was gazing inquisitively into the distance in one, ignoring the tangle of his siblings (in which _Oscar Mike_ was obviously about to triumph but _blacksnake_ was holding her own). In another, he'd obviously just been jumped by _shamal_ and was snarling as he twisted, though even that expression looked somehow good-natured.

Bo's attention was abruptly jerked away from Nate. _Evan_.

Nate looked up and then stood; Evan had his bag over his shoulder and was wearing his boonie hat and jacket. 

"Hey," Evan said awkwardly. "I, uh--there's a chopper going back today, so I--I gotta start saying my good-byes. And I know I can't go anywhere without talking to you and Bo first."

Nate looked down at Bo, a little wary of how she would take this abrupt departure, so much like the sudden weaning of the pups. Nate had known Evan would have to leave soon--he'd been with them for weeks now, and there was no reason for him to stay with First Recon once they were out of the invasion. Still, Bo had needed him badly, and remained fiercely protective of him.

Bo looked back up at Nate, exasperated. _Every pup gets weaned_ , she pointed out, and she trotted up to Evan and shoved her nose against his hip. He crouched down obediently, letting Bo wash his face one more time, and Nate felt it, as he knew Evan wouldn't. Bo snapped the faint bond between them, releasing Evan as she would have any pup ready to leave his mother's care. 

Then she turned back to Nate and nudged at his hand, still holding the photos. _Still mine_ , she pointed out.

Nate smiled down at her--every time he thought he'd learned to think like her, his own human attachments tripped him up--and tilted the pictures toward Evan. "We were just looking at these--Bo's litter from Kuwait. I've never shown you pictures of them, have I?"

"Oh," Evan said, brightening as he stood. "No--I guess they're my brothers and sisters, huh?"

Nate grinned. He hadn't been about to say it first; he wasn't sure how Evan would take an explicit comparison. He handed over the pictures and they supplied Evan with each pup's name in turn as he looked through them.

Bo leaned against Nate's thigh, and he was aware of her deep satisfaction at having all her youngest pups--this litter and Evan--safely out of the line of fire, back in Kuwait. That made more sense than his own vague impulse to keep Evan close, Nate knew. 

"They're still in Kuwait?" Evan asked as he handed the pictures back. "I'll be passing through there on my way back, I...."

"You could visit them," Nate offered, trying not to make it a demand no matter how greedily pleased Bo seemed by the idea. "If you'd take a picture of them, we'd really appreciate it. If you tell people you're looking for Nameth and Victory, and that you know me and Bo, they should understand, and the pups are old enough that we want them to be meeting strangers. You've only been around vaccinated wolves, so I can't think of any reason they'd keep you away."

Evan nodded, and looked down at Bo again. "I will, then. I'll stop in and see them, okay? Tell them Mom says hi."

Bo shifted forward just enough to catch Evan's hand in her teeth. Evan stayed very still, his smile turning curious but not fearful. Nate watched as Bo pressed carefully down with her teeth, indenting but not breaking the skin, and then she sat back against Nate's side again. 

Evan looked up at Nate, eyebrows raised, waiting for an explanation. Nate held out his own right hand, pointing to the scattering of tiny scars on the back and palm. "That's how she claimed me when we met. You're allowed to go off on your own, but this doesn't mean you're not adopted anymore. Don't forget us."

"I won't," Evan promised solemnly, shaking Nate's scarred hand with his bitten one. "I couldn't, honestly."

Nate shook his hand firmly and then let him go.

* * *

First Recon left Baghdad a couple of days later, only to end up in a camp south of the city with even less to occupy them than they'd had in Baghdad. The men kept enough discipline for Nate not to officially notice their lapses; he wasn't about to start assigning them PT or making them set up pointless fortifications just to keep them, or himself, busy. Not when they were on their way home, all just putting in their time until they were free of this. Not when he and Bo....

It crystallized in his head all at once when they were sitting for chow at the end of the day: they were almost done. The end of this deployment would make a suitable moment for their resignation, and he and Bo were going to leave the Corps. Nate had promised Bo an end to this, an end to obeying the men who'd prosecuted this war, and it was almost in reach now. Nate had been keeping his head down, taking care of the platoon and following orders, but it was time to start looking forward.

Bo looked up at him without surprise or dismay, just a wide-open curiosity, the most unreservedly positive feeling he'd had from her in weeks. _What next? How do we make things better?_

 _I don't know_ , Nate frowned down at her as her question opened up an unpredictable future not wholly determined by her existence. The Marines had given them to each other, and Nate had no idea what they'd be if they weren't Marines, or what they could do that might mean anything. Looking up again, he accidentally caught Captain Patterson's eye, and Nate put his hand on Bo's head as he realized: _I do know what we have to do first._

Bo stayed behind by tacit mutual agreement, but she guided him by the pack-sense of the camp to Patterson's precise location a few hours later. He was standing out back of the tent that housed the chapel, one of the more deserted areas of the camp at this hour. He didn't have Athena with him either, and he had a folder tucked under his arm.

"Sir," Nate said, keeping his eyes steady on Patterson's face, not trying to make out even the color of the folder in the darkness. "I need some--advice."

"Advice, Nate?" Patterson asked, quirking a slight smile. 

Nate looked away, not sure what to make of that expression. It was probably the gentlest reaction he was going to get to this. 

"I've--we've already decided," Nate admitted to the darkness. "But I never thought I'd make her a one-hitch bitch. She could have been great, but--"

"She is," Patterson said firmly, and then went on more slowly. "She deserves a better war. They all do. I know Athena does."

Nate met his gaze again, then, and despite the way the pack-sense was almost entirely opaque between them, Nate understood that Patterson was with him; he had no more heart for this than Nate did. Nate wondered whether Athena had had any impulses like Bo's, and whether there might be a time, years and miles from now, when he could ask.

Patterson held out the folder, pressing it lightly against Nate's chest. "Take this. I can get another copy. The sooner you put the paperwork through, the sooner you can get her clear. Christ knows how long we'll be sitting out here in the desert, but you might as well get the wheels turning."

Nate nodded and raised his hand to take hold of the folder. It didn't have much heft, for what it was.

Patterson took his hand away from it and settled his palm on the back of Nate's neck, tightening his grip just far enough to make Nate feel like someone here was in charge. Nate felt his shoulders slump, finally recognizing that he had come to Patterson for permission, or some kind of assurance that taking Bo out of the Corps wouldn't ruin her life even more than staying in would. He hadn't expected this sympathy. 

Patterson stepped in closer, resting his other arm lightly around Nate's shoulder's as he said quietly, "Wherever you take her, she'll always have you. Bo didn't choose the Corps when she was a pup--she chose her brother. She's not going to change her mind on you."

* * *

Nate took a full day to make sure he had every word of his request for resignation just right. There was a whole section of the request that only had to be included for brothers of bitches; Patterson had highlighted the regulations regarding that part, underlining the provisions that Nate needed. Nate wondered if that meant Patterson would be making the same requests for himself and Athena, or if that had been strictly for Nate's benefit.

In the morning of the next day, when chow and morning inspections were out of the way, Nate pinged Schwetje and asked for a moment to speak privately. Schwetje granted it, but when Nate arrived, folder tucked under his arm and Bo at his side, Griego and Talon were there. Griego's eye went immediately to the folder, and his chin jerked up in an ugly sort of triumph. Nate kept his own face blank and Bo kept the communication strictly focused as Nate reiterated through the pack-sense to Schwetje, _Privately, sir?_

"Yeah, we're done here," Schwetje said aloud, flapping a casual hand at his XO, and Griego gave a not-quite-sneering nod to Nate and slipped out. 

Nate stepped forward and offered the folder to Schwetje, giving him a moment to read the top sheet before he said, "I'd like to keep this quiet, sir, if possible. I don't want it all over the pack-sense when we're still in a war zone. I don't want my men to feel that I'm not fully committed to leading them for as long as we're in country."

Schwetje raised his eyebrows, and Nate braced himself to defend that statement. He _was_ committed to his men; he wasn't asking to leave Iraq one minute before they did, even if he knew he was done after this.

But Schwetje only said, "Sure. Anything to keep the gossip down, right?"

He smiled a little at that, and Nate stared back blankly. _Gossip_ wasn't exactly the way he'd describe the loss of confidence he wanted to avert.

Schwetje added, "I guess it had to break one way or the other if you were serious, and Colbert's been in longer."

Nate's mouth actually dropped open; he felt Bo shift restlessly at his side, and he wasn't sure which one of them thought, plaintively, _Oh. Can we...?_

"Sir," Nate said stiffly, shutting off that thought, whether it was his or Bo's, as ruthlessly as he'd ever controlled anything. "I have not discussed this decision with Sergeant Colbert, and my decision has nothing whatsoever to do with him."

It was Schwetje's turn to give Nate a blank look, but after a moment his slightly conspiratorial smile returned. "Sure, Nate. Of course. I understand. I'll forward this up to Godfather, and you'll get your answer directly one way or the other. We'll keep this out of the pack-sense."

Nate couldn't argue, not least because Schwetje was so unbearably close to being right. Nate saluted, Bo bowed to Yellowjacket, and they turned and walked out, trying desperately not to think about what might be possible now.

* * *

Nate had to focus intently, for the rest of the day, to keep the thought out of his head. Worse than the idea, or any way he might articulate the idea, was the unruly _feeling_ that kept leaking out. He would be concentrating with all his might on paperwork or the sixteenth head-count in an hour and he would find himself wanting to smile, feeling hopeful about something. Then he would fall into the trap of trying to figure out what he was looking forward to, and there was the thought, just waiting for him.

It had been easier to ignore when there was real work to do, real danger to contend with. Here he was limited to make-work and coping with the scuffles and communicable diseases that were the inevitable results of all of First Recon being stuck out here together with nothing to do for entertainment but each other, one way or another. The capture the flag games were getting intense, elaborate, and increasingly weird, but since they'd also been officially banned after the last bad outbreak of fistfights and bites, Nate tried not to know too much about them.

Nate got through the day by the application of careful, conscious effort at focusing on the present. _Be a wolf,_ , he told himself, trying to focus only on the present, to forget the future again. Bo pointed out that wolves went right ahead and wanted things they wanted, and Nate went back to studiously focusing on whatever was in front of him, and on making sure that what was in front of him wasn't One Alpha's team leader.

By dusk he'd given up on doing anything directly useful and went out for a run; Bo raced circles around him, flying over the sand. Nate didn't realize until Rudy fell into step beside him that Bo had been herding him. 

Rudy had been Team Leader of Team Three ever since the ambush at Muwaffaqiyah; Pappy had had to be cas-evaced, leaving the shieldmates separated despite Nate's best plans for keeping them together. Now Rudy gave Nate a sympathetic smile--something Nate would have found harder to accept from anyone else but Mike--and nodded toward the farthest fences. Nate nodded back, and tried not to let his mind settle on anything but the rhythm of pounding feet.

* * *

Shortly afterward, Nate found a project to distract himself. He planned it out with the same thoroughness he would have applied to any recon mission, and took it to Godfather with considerably more trepidation. Nate was honestly shocked when Godfather looked Nate thoughtfully and inscrutably up and down for a few seconds, and then said, "It'll be good for them. Yes, Lieutenant. Run with it."

Nate grinned, as much in surprise as in pleasure, and went to brief Bravo Two on their upcoming field trip to the ancient city of Babylon. 

The pack-sense was full of eagerness to be out and active as soon as Nate began to explain; starved as they were for something to do, the men listened to Nate's sketch of the historical and cultural significance of Babylon as though it were any other mission briefing. Trombley took notes. 

Nate assured all of them that the trip was strictly optional--Iraq was enemy territory, and driving through dozens of unsecured miles of it just to play tourist was a risk--but the unity of the pack-sense was absolute. No one was willing to be left behind.

Once they were on the road it really did feel like a mission: they were back in the Humvees, in their standard convoy order, bits of song rippling up and down the line through the air and the pack-sense. They had somewhere to go, an objective in sight. 

When they arrived at the ancient city the men crowded up to the dazzling Ishtar Gate to meet their tour guide, but the wolves scattered in all directions, falling immediately into a combination of reconnaissance and hide-and-seek. They would map and patrol the whole area, connected by the pack-sense, while the humans concerned themselves with human pursuits. Nate stayed mostly near the tour guide, taking the brunt of his variety of stories while the men trailed after, wandering through the maze of the half-reconstructed ruins. 

After an hour or so, Bo dashed up to Nate and cut him out of the pack. Nate shot their guide an apologetic look and followed her, though it had to be obvious even to a wolfless man that her demeanor was entirely _Come here, come play with me_ , and not any indication of trouble. Nate obediently trotted after her, wondering if he'd been inducted into a game of tag or hide and seek without knowing--the wolves of the pack were radiating a low but cheerful level of _up to something_ , which was no help at all--and then Bo led him around a corner and suddenly took off at a sprint he couldn't keep up with. It was obvious he wasn't supposed to try.

Nate watched her until she ducked down an alley and then stepped into the narrow shade of the nearest head-high wall and tilted his head back. He'd wait a few minutes to see if she'd just meant to give him a moment alone, or if she had some other plan. Whatever she intended, he'd do best to let her have it.

This was good: this trip, and being here with the men. They were having fun. Nate found himself smiling--widely, unguardedly, as he hadn't let himself at the time--at the memory of Brad talking about how they'd all followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great now, conquering Afghanistan and Iraq. Alone, with the pack-sense drawn tightly closed around him as it always was these days, Nate could spend a moment indulging the thought that that had been aimed at him, that Brad had said it to show off to him. He knew Nate had studied Classics; that was one of the many things they'd had time to learn about each other, the first day they met. Brad would know Nate was enjoying the historical aspect of this trip more than anyone else.

"Oh," Brad said, and Nate straightened up sharply to find Brad standing five meters away. He was just coming around a corner, as if Nate's thought had summoned him--but no, of course Nate hadn't done that. Bo had. 

Nate knew he should say something--apologize for Bo or explain that he hadn't known. He ought to have explained any of the things that would have been obvious to Brad in the pack-sense if Nate dared to unfurl himself into it, or if Brad could be persuaded to relax out of his own cool distance.

But Nate couldn't bring himself to say a word, and Brad stood there looking a little more startled than the occasion probably warranted. It made him look strangely defenseless. Nate took a few steps toward him, and Brad moved in at the same pace, as though some kind of reciprocal gravity dragged them. 

Nate had been careful, all through the invasion, about not paying special attention to Brad. He'd never been alone with Brad out of sight of the platoon, even though the pack-sense made visual privacy the merest of polite fictions. He'd been yet more careful about it in the last few weeks, in camp, when his own half-formed wishes were bubbling so close to the surface. He couldn't remember the last time he'd even looked directly at Brad.

Now, Nate couldn't imagine what he'd been afraid of. He didn't think he could have opened himself to the pack-sense--to Brad--if his life depended on it. He definitely couldn't speak. 

They stopped out of reach of each other. Nate had no idea what expression was on his own face, but Brad's surprise had vanished into an intense scrutiny. He kept looking Nate up and down as though Nate were terrain he needed to map, a defensive structure whose breaching point he needed to identify. He looked as if Nate might vanish at any second, or the bright afternoon light suddenly go out, leaving Brad to work from memory. 

For Nate's part, he couldn't stop watching Brad's face: the restless searching gaze, the way his lips parted a few times as if to speak, and then stopped. Nate studied every familiar line that he'd barely dared to look at for months now, Brad's face sun-browned and squinting.

Nate heard a crunch on the pathway at the juncture behind him, and Brad's gaze darted over his shoulder. "There you are," he sighed, and then politely, as if nothing had happened, "Sir."

Nate nodded. "Brad."

Brad brushed past him, close enough for their shoulders and the backs of their hands to touch, and went to follow Frost. Nate didn't look back as he jogged around the corner to find Bo waiting for him.

* * *

After the trip to Babylon, Nate could feel the focus of the camp changing. Not only within Bravo Two's pack-sense--all through First Recon the knowledge was bubbling up from nowhere that they'd be sent home soon. Every man and wolf was falling into alignment with that certainty, even if the certainty changed from day to day or hour to hour. It was barely two weeks, in the event, before it was actually happening. 

The convoy back down to Kuwait seemed like just another part of the same thing they'd been doing. Everyone was happier, and there was an undeniable anticipation electrifying the pack-sense, but it was another trip down the same kind of highway through the same kind of desert.

It wasn't until they boarded the planes that it really sunk in that this was different, that they were going home. The invasion was over for them, which brought the end of everything else closer, too. Nate's request for resignation had been accepted, though he hadn't been given an official separation date yet. They were leaving Iraq, and Nate was never coming back.

On the first leg of the flight, toward Germany, Nate felt suspended in more than a literal sense. He knew, logically, that he would still be with Bravo Two for a while after they got back, that he wouldn't step off the plane and out of Recon, or out of the Marine Corps, but it would be different back in Pendleton. The stakes would be lower, and Bo wouldn't be in any danger of fomenting a mutiny. There would be chances for something resembling actual privacy, a chance to at least talk to Brad about... whatever they had to talk about, by now. 

Nate had managed to keep his impending resignation out of the pack-sense; Griego had accepted what he obviously viewed as his victory over Nate with relatively good sportsmanship, or else he wasn't willing to disobey a direct order to keep it quiet. Brad didn't know, and Nate didn't know how it might change things. It wasn't a possibility they'd discussed, six months ago on the beach, when they'd talked about how hard this would be. Nate couldn't imagine, now, how they could have not seen this coming. Maybe it had been unthinkable to Brad that anyone would leave the Corps; maybe it still was. Maybe--

Bo closed her teeth firmly on Nate's hand, not quite enough to break the skin, and Nate tore his gaze away from the unchanging view of clouds to look down at her. He hardly needed their bond to take her meaning. _Stop that_.

Nate put a smile on his face and nodded. There was no knowing yet. He quieted his own thoughts with yet another head-count of their platoon, reaching through the pack-sense for each man and wolf, each with his, or her, own flavor of eagerness to be home. Nate wasn't the only one who couldn't think of anything but what was coming next; the anxious drumming of his pulse was echoed again and again in every member of the pack.

* * *


	5. Oceanside, June-August 2003

The last leg of the journey home was a convoy like the first, but this time they were crammed into a series of white school buses. Their weapons had already been surrendered to the armory, and they'd shed their Kevlar and stowed their gear in a transport truck, so each of them took up less space than they ever had in any convoy up to now. Teams automatically grouped themselves together, and Nate was a little amused to realize that they were all cramming into bus seats in the same accustomed configurations from their Humvees: Brad and Ray had the foremost seat, with Navi and Frost crammed together underneath, while Walt shared the seat behind them with Trombley, and so on down the line.

Nate took his place, sharing a seat with Mike toward the back, and had to acknowledge that it felt _right_ to have Christeson and Stafford behind them, arguing good-naturedly about whose mama was going to cry more and who would have the biggest sign waiting for them. Nate shared a smiling glance with Mike; there was no need to get into that argument with his own seatmate. Mike's wife and daughters would be waiting, having only had to drive ten minutes to get to the base. Whoever showed up to meet Nate could only bring what they could carry on a transcontinental flight.

The familiar noise of banter and argument fell away into quiet as the buses headed through Pendleton. It was only Bravo Two on this bus, all together for one last part of this journey before they would be released to take leave. The anticipation they felt was so unanimous that the pack-sense was entirely occupied by it; they all seemed to breathe in sync, their hearts beating in time, a single counterpointed rhythm of men and wolves. They were as perfectly united as they had ever been in the hunt or in combat, a single perfect creature poised for what came next--and what came next had always been danger and violence.

It was more than a little surreal, in the midst of that, to pull up onto the parade ground and see the waiting crowd of families holding red white and blue signs and balloons. They were suddenly in the midst of women and children and wolfless men, family and home that had nothing to do with the pack. The quivering focus of the pack-sense held another couple of minutes, while the buses came to a halt, and then the bus's radio crackled with a few words of official release from Godfather, and Nate looked down at Bo. _Let them go_.

The pack-sense snapped from its lockstep coordination like a set of pool balls breaking, and even before they moved Nate could feel the men and wolves careening away, their thoughts and attention racing in all directions. Ray bolted from his seat and was first out the door with Navi on his heels; Nate watched through the window as the much-spoken-of Emily came running across the asphalt to meet them in a hug that was nearly a tackle.

The rest of Team One's families came pelting after. Recon families knew not to expect the pack-sense of a team to relax into leave instantaneously, and stayed close to let the men keep in sight of each other at first. Nate saw Brad saunter up, identified Brad's mother, father, and sisters as much by recollection shared through the pack-sense as from any times he'd ever actually chanced to meet them. Nate was aware of a general cheer as Rudy found Pappy waiting for him in the crowd, but he couldn't tear his eyes from Brad's wide, easy smile.

Mike tugged on Nate's arm, and Nate realized the rest of the platoon had cleared the bus. He and Mike were the last ones left except for Stafford and Christeson and their brothers, who were lingering loyally but impatiently to follow them out. 

"Go on, go ahead," Mike said, waving the boys forward, and they grinned, grabbing each other's hands and running down the aisle of the bus together with Scooby ahead and Dusty behind. Nate stepped out after that, knowing that Mike and Ash were going to take his and Bo's six one more time. Nate stepped off the bus to the sight of Stafford and Christeson clutched in a generally beaming-and-sobbing group hug by both their mothers. Assorted Christeson and Stafford siblings were holding up an enormous WELCOME HOME JOHN AND EVAN banner adorned with paired shields and photos of both of them.

Nate was laughing as he started to look around, and Bo flashed _sister, yes, allowed,_ a second before Jenny jumped on him from his blindside. Bo had given Nate just enough warning not to fight her down and into a chokehold. He shrugged her off instead, a familiar maneuver from years of piggyback rides, turning to hug her as Shannon raced up and joined in. Bo leaned against their legs to complete the set of Fick siblings, Nate surrounded by all three of his girls. When Nate pulled away he saw Mike kissing Cara, with his younger daughter already perched on his hip, the older with her arms wrapped around Ash.

Then Nate's parents were there, flanking his grandmother, and Nate swooped in to hug her gingerly, and let her fish his grandfather's lucky hammer out from under his shirt. The parachute cord was unspeakably grimy by now, but the little Thor's hammer still shone, the runes for the names of his grandfather and his grandfather's brother still visible. 

"Brought you home safe," his grandma murmured, closing her fist against it and tapping her knuckles gently against Nate's chest. "Brought you both home safe."

Bo pressed close for her share of hugs and attention, and Nate hugged his mother, hugged his father, and tried to persuade himself that the waiting was over. They were home.

* * *

Nate had given up his apartment before the deployment, putting his stuff into storage rather than paying rent on a place he might not come back to for a year, or ever. Now that he was back he'd have to locate housing, but it would probably be short term; if he couldn't nail down an apartment of his own on a short-term lease he could likely find a single officer in need of a roommate.

For now he had a hotel room--one of three his parents had reserved for the long weekend they were planning to spend in Oceanside. The rooms were all in a row, though Nate's room didn't have a connecting door to the other two. His parents, grandmother, and sisters had a suite and another room, all opening off each other, and after dinner they all settled in the suite's living room, perched on couches and chairs, crowding close to Nate and Bo. 

Nate demanded updates on his grandmother's neighbors and church friends, his sisters' friends and boyfriends, his parents' jobs, fending off the inevitable questions for a little while. When they did demand stories he told them about the litter who'd been born in Kuwait, and then, inevitably, about Evan. He even used Shannon's laptop to log into an email account he hadn't checked in months to find the pictures Evan had promised to send. There were more than he expected, but Nate managed to pull up a safe, innocuous group shot of a grinning Evan flashing a thumbs up, surrounded by puppies. _Peanut butter cookies_ was, of course, perched triumphantly on Evan's shoulder.

Bo crowded up to Nate's side when he saw that picture; until then she'd alternated between standing guard beside Nate's grandma's armchair and patrolling around the rooms. The hotel was officially wolf-welcoming, and there was a faint ineradicable smell of previous guests, but the effect was more of comforting familiarity than intruding on another wolf's territory.

After a few hours Nate started to feel strangely exhausted, and his throat was sore no matter how much water he drank. Finally he had the moment of realization that he remembered from his visits home after Afghanistan and after TBS. He loved his family, but they were wolfless civilians, so they were a little alien to him all the same. It was exhausting to talk to people when he actually had to say all the words, and couldn't rely on the pack-sense to fill half of it in for him. Now that he'd noticed it he felt the fatigue weighing him down in every bone and muscle, and his throat seemed to close on further words.

Bo came and dropped heavily down to lay on his feet, and Nate smiled at her. 

"Sorry," he said, looking up and around at his family. "We're pretty beat. I think we'd better get to bed."

It wasn't that simple, of course; there was a round of protest and insistence, and hugs, and one-last-thing. Bo pursued a fairly low-key version of her strategy of being blithely oblivious to human niceties. She waited until he'd hugged everyone and then herded Nate inexorably toward the door, and within ten minutes they were out in the hall and headed down to their own room. 

Nate stripped right there in front of the door, wincing at the stink of his feet after a couple of travel days in his boots. He dropped his fatigues on top of his boots and headed into the shower, Bo following him right in. Nate used up every last drop of the hotel's neutral-smelling shampoo scrubbing her to her own satisfaction before she'd let him alone to kill a couple of pristine white hotel washcloths and an entire bar of soap trying to wash the last of the desert off himself, to say nothing of days of travel. 

He felt like he'd taken off a layer of skin by the time he was done, and his exhaustion was replaced by restlessness. Ever since leaving Pendleton, he'd been reaching out half-consciously through the pack-sense, checking on Bravo Two. He hadn't had the time or attention to attempt anything like a proper head-count, but he needed the general feel of them--still connected, all safe--to steady himself in the absence of a weapon to rest his hand on or a sector to monitor for threats.

Now, alone with Bo, he had the time, but he knew he shouldn't. They were all on leave, and sooner or later they'd be spreading out beyond his reach. Not much longer after that, they wouldn't be his and Bo's anymore at all. He reached out for a brief touch, just enough to know that they were there, and then he focused on himself and Bo. He wouldn't be able to sleep yet, and he knew she wouldn't either, even though neither of them could bear any more time with civilians. Nate could hear the indistinct murmur of his parents' voices through the wall, and that was enough to put him into motion.

Nate went over to the bed and opened the bag he'd packed months ago for this leave, getting out some clean civvies. He'd lost weight in the desert; his jeans sagged precariously over his hips, and his t-shirt was baggier than he expected, but he was decent enough. He hesitated over shoes, glancing down at his sore, pale feet. He wasn't going to go far--and it would probably be for the best if he couldn't go in anywhere to get a drink. It would be too easy to decide to medicate himself into sleep by way of embarrassing public drunkenness. He just needed to move around a little; they would take a walk and burn off this vague disquiet. 

He grabbed a keycard, leaving his wallet with his shoes, and slipped out into the hallway with Bo. They took the stairs down to the lobby, and Nate bounced on the balls of his feet, enjoying the sensation of walking barefoot. When they stepped out into the lobby, Nate was looking down at his feet, wiggling his toes and enjoying the novel feel of the carpet. He wondered whether he was more likely to catch something from it or be patient zero for a horrible international athlete's foot outbreak. 

Then he realized that Bo had gone completely still, and he walked back to her. She was trembling, holding herself back from something so overwhelming she wasn't even telling Nate what it was, though he could feel no sense of threat. Nate set his hand on her shoulder and looked around to see what had caught her attention.

Nate froze, too. Frost was standing on the other side of the glass wall at the front of the lobby, looking back at Bo from the sidewalk. Brad, beside him, was leaning against the glass, facing away. He was dressed like Nate in jeans and a t-shirt that hung a little too loosely over his shoulders, and he had his arms folded in front of him. The hems of his jeans hung down to his heels, so Nate couldn't see what kind of shoes he was wearing.

 _Because the shoes matter_ , Nate found himself thinking. He knew he was going to remember that: that he'd stood here looking at Brad waiting for him and wondered what he had on his feet. 

_Can we_ , Bo asked, leaning slightly forward. _Will something bad happen now if we act like mates?_

Nate closed his eyes, trying to consider the consequences reasonably. He hadn't gotten far before he was answering her. 

_No. If they give themselves to us now, like this--_ Wolves were never very clear on the difference between on- and off-duty, though Nate supposed that Bo would get the idea once their resignation went through. _We're not in a war zone anymore, so nothing bad will happen. And no one can take them away, because no one gives them to us here. It's their choice and our choice._

Bo sprang forward like a bullet, racing across the lobby. She had to swerve aside at the last minute to keep from running straight into the door--she outpaced the motion-detector--but Frost met her just outside and she bowled him over gleefully, the two of them rolling across the sidewalk and nearly into the street in a tumble of white and sandy fur.

Nate followed her at a slightly more measured pace, but he was still on the sidewalk with them before they'd come to a stop. He watched long enough to be reasonably sure they wouldn't fall into traffic before he turned to look toward Brad.

Brad had turned toward him, and was standing with his hands at his sides, his shoulder still nearly against the glass. He was watching Nate with a carefully neutral expression that made Nate want to--

But he could, now. Nate moved before he thought, covering the distance in a few strides and getting his hands on Brad's shoulders, too sharp and nearly naked under the inadequate cover of a t-shirt. Nate pressed him back against the glass--Brad went easily, yielding, a smile starting to bloom on his face--and kissed him. 

The kissing felt strange. Their mouths didn't slot together in quite the way Nate remembered, or it was somehow not as satisfying as it should have been. 

Nate drew back slightly and licked his lips, and then it struck him: he'd never kissed Brad outside the heat-shack. They'd never done this when the pack-sense wasn't forced wide open between them by heat, and now they were not only in their right minds, but closed to each other by the habit of long, wary months. 

"Brad," Nate murmured against his mouth, coaxing even as he willed himself to open, just to Brad, just enough to actually be here and feel this.

"Nate," Brad sighed. Nate felt the ice crack as he pressed in again.

When their lips met again Nate could feel Brad there with him in the pack-sense. It wasn't the utter immersion in each other they'd had before--but then the rest of it was different, too. They were clothed and upright, for one thing; the easy brush of their mouths against each other was the most naked contact they had. This wasn't a distraction from anything, or a detour. Nothing drove them now. They could stop here and stay, learning each other's mouths slowly, getting lost just in this. 

It was worth getting lost in; Nate wanted to learn every touch, every way he could make Brad's breath catch, every way Brad's lips and tongue and teeth could combine to make his brain short out. Nate's right hand shifted from Brad's shoulder to the back of his neck, curling over the nape like it belonged there. Brad's arms closed around Nate tentatively at first, a wordless question Nate could feel in the pack-sense as much as in Brad's body. Nate leaned into Brad, giving back _yes, yes_ everywhere, and Brad's grip tightened.

One of Brad's hands settled low on Nate's hip, and Brad arched into Nate a little. It was nothing yet--neither of them were hard, there was no hurry--but it felt good anyway, just rocking into each other, letting their bodies learn each other again when they weren't being driven on irresistibly. Nate let his left hand slide down Brad's side, his fingers flirting under the edge of Brad's t-shirt.

They snapped apart at a sudden sharp noise, taking a shoulder-to-shoulder stance as Bo and Frost scrambled upright and spread out to flank them. 

A man in the uniform of hotel security stood there, raising his hands and letting the whistle fall from his mouth to dangle on a cord around his neck. His brother, slate grey and smaller than either Bo or Frost by a significant margin, looked as apologetic as the man did.

"Welcome home, gents," the security guard said with, to Nate's ear, a familiar sergeantly tone of easing things along. "We're glad to have you boys back, fully understand how it is when you've been apart, and we do offer active-duty discounts if you need a room. Wolves welcome, of course. But you're blocking the sidewalk out here."

Nate looked past him, and realized there were a handful of civilians standing at a cautious distance. 

_Camera_ , Brad noted, wryly amused. _We're a tourist attraction_.

Nate didn't look any more closely at any of the civilians. They weren't the problem here. _I do have a room here, actually, but--_

Whatever was about to happen between him and Brad, Nate would rather have done this in full view of everyone at Camp Matilda than next door to his parents.

 _Understood_ , Brad returned silently, as Nate said aloud, "We were just going. Thank you. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks."

Brad closed a hand on his arm and was towing him backward even as Nate finished speaking. Bo and Frost dodged past them and went on ahead, making for the spot where Brad had parked his truck, a couple of blocks away. Nate exchanged cheerful waves with the people who'd--thankfully--known better than to intrude on either his and Brad's space or Bo and Frost's, then turned and double-timed it down the sidewalk at Brad's side.

Frost and Bo were already settled together in the back seat by the time Nate and Brad climbed in up front, and though it felt like they should have screeched away like a getaway car, Brad's motions were unhurried as he checked his mirrors and blind spots and pulled into traffic.

Nate forced himself to keep still, curling his toes against the floor mat. He was weirdly conscious of all the skin exposed on his arms, and kept his hands pressed against his thighs. He tried not to think about how close he was now to what he'd been waiting for all this time. They were on their way.

Nate was vaguely aware that Brad actually owned a house, roots emphatically planted in Oceanside. And Brad had obviously managed to shake his family already; beyond that Nate honestly didn't care if they were going back to a bare, dusty mattress if it was private and Brad was there. 

They'd gone a couple of miles in silence when Brad said, "My parents usually skip the signs and balloons and welcome me back by going by my place to fill the fridge and make sure the lights work, so it won't be too bad."

Nate adjusted his mental image accordingly, and then realized that Brad had spoken aloud instead of just supplying the mental image for him. They'd both instinctively closed off from each other again when interrupted--when there was an audience. Nate considered saying something about it, and then considered the possibility of letting something slip and having a conversation about the fact that he was leaving the Marines before he got to kiss Brad again. He kept his mouth shut along with the rest of himself.

A minute after that Nate realized that he ought to have actually _said_ something in answer to Brad, and tried to think of what it ought to have been. Or maybe he should say something else--they were really alone together for the first time in months, there had to be a thousand things to talk about, but Nate's mind was a blank beyond the sheer fact of being here, with Brad, headed to Brad's house. Maybe it was enough, for now, that they could have talked if they wanted to; maybe they didn't need to actually do the talking just yet.

Nate glanced over his shoulder at Bo and Frost, to see if they were managing more smoothly than the humans. He found Frost licking Bo's face companionably; she had her eyes closed, her head tilted to accept Frost's attentions, but Nate still got the impression that she was laughing at him.

 _At both of you_ , Bo assured him. _Humans_.

Nate looked over at Brad, and caught Brad stealing a sideways glance at him. Brad gave a startled, caught-out smile, and Nate couldn't restrain his own answering grin; he just hoped his sandblasted desert tan hid the heat in his face.

Brad faced front, straightening his shoulders and aligning his hands primly at ten and two. "I should probably tell you--I actually kind of suck at driving while distracted."

"Ah," Nate said, glancing back again at Brad's thoroughly distracted brother, utterly failing to help him with that. "I won't, then."

"Thanks," Brad said blandly, and grinned again when Nate reached over and curled his hand over the edge of the driver's seat, touching just his fingertips to the outside of Brad's thigh.

"Much," Nate added.

"Good, then I'll only crash the car a little," Brad agreed, and the silence after was a little easier, even if it was just as absolute. This was still Brad, still the guy Nate had been through the heat-shack with twice already. Strange as this was, they weren't strangers to each other, and what was coming next was all up to them.

It was only a few minutes more before Brad pulled into the driveway of a small, tidy house in a neighborhood Nate was familiar with. Mike and Cara lived only a couple of blocks away, and it was obvious from the neatly marked wolf-paths on every block--and the welcome-home signs and balloons at a few they passed--that practically every house here belonged to a Marine. They were in friendly territory.

They'd barely parked before the wolves let themselves out and were racing off for the nearest wolf-path. Bo shot Nate a brief but perfectly explanatory image of the beach and Frost's longing for it. Flying over an ocean without getting to put his paws in it had been maddening after so many desert months.

Nate and Brad were alone. Brad was still facing forward, one hand on the keys, the other still on the wheel. 

Nate glanced around the street. Brad's neighbors, and their sight lines, were potentially everywhere, and Brad probably didn't want to hear anyone's comments on this shouted across the street to him when he walked outside tomorrow morning. "Inside?"

Brad gave a stiff nod and swung out of the truck.

Nate followed a couple of paces behind, keeping his hands shoved into his pockets and not crowding Brad as he got the door unlocked. The entryway was tile, pleasantly cool under Nate's bare feet as he shut the door behind him. Brad set down his keys on a little table there, put his wallet beside them, toed off his go-fasters and kicked them underneath. Nate stood by the door and watched, waiting, while Brad took a visible breath, and he felt Brad open up to him again a second before Brad started to turn.

Nate relaxed into it, opening himself reciprocally as he stepped in to meet Brad. There was no hesitation this time. From the first kiss it was obvious that kissing _was_ just on the way to something else. 

This, here, now, this was what Nate had been waiting for. This was the kiss he'd turned aside from months ago on a dark beach, wholly human, wholly theirs, but no less necessary than heat. Their mouths were rough against each other, teeth scraping. They ground against each other, Brad giving way in stumbling steps to draw Nate further inside. Nate got an enticing flash of the bed he was aiming for, but couldn't bear to stop touching and pressing close. Brad didn't suggest that he should. 

Nate got both hands under the edge of Brad's t-shirt, running his palms over the tattoo at the small of his back until Brad shivered against him and pushed back, holding his ground long enough to kiss back fiercely. Nate tugged up on Brad's shirt, and Brad took a decisive step back, stripping it off and tossing it away. Nate followed his lead, pulling off his own shirt, shoving his jeans down as Brad unbuttoned his. He felt a strange giddy eagerness at the sight of Brad's naked body and the knowledge that it wasn't a means to anything, not a duty. It was just sex, just for him, for the two of them. 

Brad sprawled back on the bed, grinning, his legs spread and his dick bobbing up. Nate crawled over him, capturing his smiling mouth in another kiss and stretching out over him. He shuddered as he pressed his half-hard dick to the crease of Brad's hip, and felt the hot line of Brad's cock against his skin. Brad's hands settled in the small of his back, and Nate snorted and gave a decided wriggle of his hips. Brad huffed against his mouth, pushing up into another kiss and sliding his hands obediently down to grab Nate's ass.

 _You'll know what I don't want when I don't want it_ , Nate promised, and got back the simultaneous impressions of a smirk and salute. Brad's hands tightened on his ass, tugging him into a proper thrust as he hardened. Nate got his knees down and rocked into Brad, and Brad arched a little under him. Nate had to raise his head to watch as Brad threw his head back, baring his throat, and it occurred to Nate that he'd never kissed Brad there, never licked the line of that tendon. He settled down to rectify the oversight, ruthlessly using the pack-sense between them to find the places that made Brad groan and clutch him harder.

"Nate," Brad gasped, "Nate, Nate--" and it wasn't a request or a demand, wasn't anything but Brad being allowed to say it.

Nate thrust down against Brad's skin, sweat-dampened and hot, pushing back _yes, yes, yes_ with every kiss along the line of Brad's jaw and the scrape of his teeth against the softness of Brad's throat. Brad shifted one hand to the back of Nate's neck, tugging him up, and Nate shifted up to meet him in another kiss, breathless and constantly falling apart as they ground against each other. 

Nate wasn't sure which one of them started laughing first, but he knew he was the one who thought first _We're more coordinated in the heat-shack_.

Brad's thought followed: _We can never tell them, they'll never let it go_.

"We do okay," Nate insisted out loud, words broken by laughter and gasps; he was so close, and he could feel enough to know that Brad was, too, a rising tide about to swamp them both. 

"Marines make do," Brad agreed, which made them both laugh harder even as they moved faster. The helpless bursts of laughter seemed like they were part of the same impulse, the electric pleasure gathering at the base of Nate's spine, curling his toes and tightening his grip on Brad.

Nate was still giggling breathlessly as he came, and laughed harder as he realized that Brad was, as ever, being instinctively self-disciplined and hadn't finished yet. 

"Don't have to drag it out this time," Nate pointed out, rolling over onto his side so that he could get his hand on Brad's dick, hooking one leg over Brad's to keep him close. 

"Maybe I wanted," Brad said, and then groaned as Nate's hand closed around him, slicked with Nate's come. Nate kissed him through the rest, until he went still and silent, coming over Nate's fingers. 

They lay face to face after, catching their breath, watching each other. Nate felt a strange sensation, like lightness or stillness, like relaxation and also like imminently falling asleep. 

Brad closed his eyes and tilted his forehead in to touch Nate's. "Welcome home."

* * *

Nate slept and woke and passed through all the in-between states of dozing and dreaming again and again. He was always conscious of Brad beside him, whether they were touching or not. At some point--deep in the night, Bo and Frost asleep now across the bedroom doorway--he startled awake, momentarily confused about why it was dark in the heat-shack.

He shifted to get more comfortable, sweeping his hand down Brad's back, and it was the softness of the mattress under him that brought him the rest of the way back. Brad's house. Oceanside. Freely chosen at long last.

Brad turned his head. Nate realized he'd been awake for a while, but his sense of contentment was as plain to Nate as the sleepy smile on his face. 

"Want me to keep watch?" Nate asked. He could feel how tired Brad was, a weight through his body that echoed the heaviness of Nate's.

Brad shook his head. "I haven't been awake that long. I just...."

Brad didn't put the rest into words, just gave Nate the gist of what was keeping him awake: a sense of astonished wonder, brought into sharp focus by the irrational fear that his life had become a good dream that would vanish in the morning. 

Brad had always kept himself to himself, but the knowledge had long since leaked into the pack-sense of his thwarted shieldmatehood. There had been a boy he'd fallen in love with in military school and waited and waited and waited for until that boy became a man who chose civilian life--and a wife--over the wolfthreat and Brad. Nate had tried not to think too much about what it meant for him and for them, now.

Brad's smile widened slightly as he shook his head, catching the drift of Nate's thoughts and pushing the shadow of comparison aside. "I feel like the wolf who caught the moon."

Nate smiled back, half at the slight drawl to Brad's words as he spoke, imitating one of Pappy's inscrutable backwoods sayings, and half at his own habitual over-analysis of that expression. A wolf who caught the moon would either be lost out in space or bring the moon crashing to Earth, with catastrophic effects either way. In the dark, still close to sleep, Nate's mind slipped easily to disasters and drastic changes.

Before he could even articulate the analogy to himself, Nate said, "I put in our resignation papers before we left Iraq."

Brad's smile went away. Nate closed his eyes, wincing, but Brad's arm came around him before Nate could withdraw himself from Brad in any other way than sight. 

"Hey," Brad said softly. "Nate, hey, no. You did the job they gave you. You kept Bo in line. We all came home."

Nate opened his eyes. Brad had rolled up onto his side, and was looking down intently at Nate, the little ambient light making his eyes look colorless but no less compelling than they'd ever been.

"I was trying my fucking hardest never to look straight at you," Brad said softly, "and even I could see what it was doing to you and Bo. I was thinking to myself I was glad you'd get stuck at a desk for a while after this, so at least you wouldn't have to worry about command getting your men and wolves killed out from under you, but I knew that was a waste of both of you. Getting out's better."

Nate exhaled. "We're not leaving you and Frost," he added, unnecessarily, and he could feel Brad waving off the idea before he'd gotten it all out of his mouth. 

"It means we'll probably have a pretty narrow window, though," Nate added, his mind going to all the paperwork in his future. "I don't know when they'll reassign me away from Bravo Two--they haven't even given me a firm resignation date yet. And as long as I'm your CO we can't--"

Nate stopped abruptly. They'd never discussed what they wanted, beyond each other. It wasn't as simple and binary a choice for humans as it was for wolves; maybe Brad--

"Yes," Brad said. "Nate, fuck, yes. Yes I want to be your shieldmate, and I want it official and Corps-registered. I wasn't--"

 _Wasn't holding on for less than that_ , Nate realized, and didn't know if that was Brad telling him or himself realizing, but it was obviously entirely true, and Brad didn't flinch from it. 

"Did you," Brad added hesitantly, and left the rest as a jumble of known facts without certain conclusions. Nate had only seriously dated women. Before tonight they had never kissed outside the heat-shack, and never had any kind of sex when heat or pack-sense wasn't spurring them on. Brad had never been quite sure what Nate wanted from him, whether Nate wanted him in spite of himself. Brad remembered, with a clarity sharp enough to cut Nate to the quick, Nate saying _I wonder whether it's them, making us feel like this_.

"I don't know," Nate said out loud, for the precision of saying one thing, even if it was one useless thing. There was no point lying, with the pack-sense open between them. "You're right, I've never done this before for real. But I never--" 

Nate gave it back to Brad in a similar jumble: the profound hassle of handling civilian men's ideas about brothers of bitches, and the even more intractable hassle of handling _Marines'_ ideas about brothers of bitches, differently impossible with officers and with enlisted men. The nearly insurmountable obstacle of finding a wolfbrother to be involved with whose brother didn't offend Bo in some way, and the times when he'd managed: the easy, fond sex-friendship he'd shared with Jim at TBS and in the 1/1, the brief intense bonds with guys he'd met in BRC and not seen since. He showed Brad the truth of the comfort he'd shared with Mike in the last few months, sexual and otherwise, when both their hearts were elsewhere.

But none of them had been brother to a wolf Bo wanted to keep the way she wanted Frost, the way a queen-wolf wanted a consort. They'd all been men Nate could say good-bye to with good grace, accepting that the exigencies of life and the Corps would separate them, meaning to keep up and not doing a very good job of it. He tried to imagine his relationship with Brad dwindling to casual emails and chance meetings, and his heart clenched painfully; Brad winced.

"I've never wanted this with anyone else because there was never anyone like you," Nate said softly. He would have stood under fire beside any of them, but Brad was the one he wanted to come home with. 

"It won't be like that, though," Brad said slowly, out loud. He stayed cuddled close to Nate in bed, but Nate could feel him edging away in the pack-sense even as the mental images flashed across: long deployments, Nate and Bo living a civilian life without them. Brad and Frost could be no more present as shieldmates than they had been for the last six miserable months. 

_But we waited_ , Nate pointed out. _We'll wait again. As many times as we have to. You're what I want. You're what we want._

Brad became briefly entirely opaque, his eyes searching Nate's face as though it could tell him more than the pack-sense Brad had closed himself off from. After a moment Brad relaxed his guard again, but still he said the words out loud before Nate could pluck the meaning out of the pack-sense. "That was the part where you were supposed to ask us to stay."

Nate stared, letting Brad feel all his honest incredulity at the idea. "I know what Recon is to you both. If you want out, we'll welcome you home for good, but--"

Brad shook his head as he leaned into a kiss, and Nate gave up on saying more. Surely they'd laid out enough, for whatever godawful hour of the night this was, their first night of leave.

 _Yeah,_ Brad agreed, throwing an arm and leg over Nate and tucking his face down against Nate's throat. _I think I could sleep now_. 

Nate smiled and kept his thoughts quiet and calm until he felt Brad drift into sleep. Nate lay awake a while longer, staring at the ceiling. He was finally free to imagine the future, and it turned out it was going to require a lot of imagination.

* * *

Nate woke up warm and mostly immobilized. He'd flipped over onto Brad at some point since he fell asleep, but Bo and Frost had come up onto the bed in the night. The wolves were lying in a tangle that was on its way to putting Nate's entire left leg to sleep, and Frost's massive paw rested delicately on his right ankle. The wolves were both deeply asleep, and Brad was dozing, half-aware but entirely inert, not at all motivated to shift from his place under the pack-pile. The pack-sense among them was as bright and open as the sunlit room; Nate could feel the lazy, random drift of Brad's not-quite-dreaming thoughts, and the sleeping breaths of the wolves, as clearly as his own mind and body. 

Nate's dick was hard, tucked between his belly and Brad's, and he could feel Brad's vague, sleepy arousal as clearly as he could feel the press of Brad's dick against his hip. Nate considered his options for getting out from under the wolves, but one was obviously far more attractive than the others. Nate turned his head and nuzzled at the side of Brad's throat, rocking down into him, giving them both just enough friction to make morning wood turn into something meaningful. 

Brad's return to full consciousness was heralded by an amused awareness of exactly what Nate was using this for and a hand on Nate's ass, adjusting his position slightly. Brad pushed up deliberately under him, and Nate mouthed at the point of his jaw, just over his pulse. Brad tilted his head to the side, giving Nate access, and Nate let out a happy sigh that caught in the middle as the slide of skin sparked something urgent in him, his hips snapping forward harder as the pleasure sharpened.

Bo snapped, Frost gave a rumbling growl, and both rolled down off the bed and straight out the back door of the house. 

Nate cracked first, laughing against Brad's throat; Brad managed to keep his voice steady as he said, "That all you wanted?"

Nate pushed up onto all fours over Brad, opening his eyes for the first time as he did. It was a good first sight of the morning. Brad's eyes were narrowed by a broad, bright grin, and the morning sunlight kissed every inch of Brad's warm skin. Brad's dick was standing up hard. There were a couple of reddened patches on Brad's throat where Nate had bitten or kissed last night and marked him up, and Nate realized that he could, now. Give or take a few bureaucratic niceties and the minor danger of getting NJP'd over an improper relationship within the chain of command, none of which Nate could give a fuck about right now, Brad was his to mark up for anyone to see. That thought, and the way Brad's smile shaded into a smirk-- _You're just getting this now?_ \--sent a bolt of heat straight to Nate's dick. 

"Sir?" Brad added, his tone teasing and challenging all at once.

"No," Nate said slowly, consideringly. "That wasn't all."

Brad kept quiet--Nate could feel his happy-amused-aroused anticipation through the pack-sense, but he held himself still and silent on the outside. Nate met his gaze with a crooked smile and said, "I've never sucked your dick."

He felt Brad's surge of want, and the sudden careful nothingness that followed; Brad's expression wavered between desperate desire and caution even as Nate sat back onto Brad's thighs and wrapped his hand around Brad's cock.

"Don't worry, I've done this before," Nate said lightly, recalling Brad's uncertainty last night about whether Nate really liked any of this. He let his honest desire underline it in the pack-sense, waiting and watching until lust won out in Brad's expression and he gave a shallow nod of acceptance.

Nate jacked Brad a little, easing himself into the double sensation of touching and being touched that flowed through the pack-sense. His own cock jerked, untouched, when Nate's thumb stroked over a spot that made Brad's breath catch, a feedback loop that had him learning all Brad's sweet spots in a handful of strokes. When he felt his recon was sufficient--and when he couldn't bear the tease anymore--Nate pushed up onto his knees again, switching position so that he was between Brad's spread legs. The pack-sense managed that for them, too, letting them move around each other without having to consider the geometry or whose legs should move first.

Nate closed his eyes again as he folded down to Brad's dick. He kept his hand on it, stroking slowly, but he let his sense of Brad's body guide him to it, focusing on the doubled sensation as he gave a first slow lick. There was the feel of Brad's cock on his tongue, the explosion of taste in his mouth, and at the same time he could feel that first wet press, still as much a tease as a pleasure. 

He felt Brad holding himself still, and he let Brad feel him smiling at that before he took Brad's cock into his mouth. From the first tentative suck, Nate knew--they both knew--it wasn't going to last long. It felt too good, sensation bouncing and amplifying between them. Nate was grinding helplessly against the sheets as Brad's dick filled his mouth. The weight and heat of it, the taste, the stretched feel of thin skin on his tongue, all felt as good as the electric pleasure echoing back to him from Brad.

Nate went down as far as he could, sucking soft and then hard, working out the best rhythm for Brad. It didn't take long before Brad's hand was on his shoulder, and then the back of his neck, and Brad was rocking up--not hard, but constantly, unstoppably--into his mouth. Nate moaned around him, his own balls tightening with his need and Brad's, and even the friction he was getting from grinding against the mattress was contributing to the way they were both spiraling rapidly toward orgasm. 

Nate realized Brad was actually going to come first for once a few seconds before it happened. He moaned, turned on and triumphant all at once, and Brad let out a reverberating growl of frustration as he arched up one last time, coming in hard pulses. Nate swallowed once and then pulled off before he could choke, jacking Brad through it and letting his come spill over his fingers. 

Brad went limp, after, and dropped out of the pack-sense for a few seconds while his neurotransmitters caught up, leaving Nate suddenly alone with his own throbbing dick--not less urgent, exactly, but the sudden separation was like a splash of cold water. Nate licked across his knuckles with the idle thought that he'd be tasting this all the time now, and then Brad's eyes snapped open and Brad was _there_ again. The afterglow rolled in through the pack-sense and made Nate want to just come and get it _over_ with, so he could be where Brad was. 

"First step," Brad said, sounding a little hoarse, like he'd been the one with a dick down his throat, and Nate was suddenly hauled up the bed and flipped onto his back. Brad rolled half onto him, pinning him with a kiss and wrapping a hand firmly around Nate's dick. 

Nate made a sharp, startled noise into Brad's mouth as Brad began a fast, tight stroke, reminding Nate that he'd been on the edge of coming a few seconds ago. He arched up into the solid weight of Brad's body, fucking Brad's fist, and the pleasure heightened quickly, startlingly solitary and focused this time. It broke over him like a wave, blotting out thought in a rush of pure sensation.

He was barely aware of feeling alone before the pack-sense came back to him. They were all even again, suffused with the same lazy feeling of satisfaction. Nate leaned his forehead against Brad's temple, sinking back into drowsiness.

"I could get used to this," Nate mumbled.

"Sleeping in my bed?" Brad replied through a yawn, and Nate wasn't sure whether he understood the sound of the words or got it through the pack-sense.

"One and done," Nate replied, shaking his hips just enough to make his softening dick swing. "Nothing _hurts_."

Brad made a wordless noise of agreement--Brad had never left all the hurting to him--and Nate settled his arm over Brad's back. It occurred to him that he'd traded one immobilizing weight for another, and that the next time he woke up he'd have to piss even worse than he did now, and coffee--

"Oh _fuck_ ," Nate snapped, jackknifing upright and looking around frantically for a clock. He was faintly aware of Brad sitting up too, scrambling slightly away from him and bracing for disaster. The wolves rushed back in from outside, taking up stations at the back and front doors. Nate shook his head even as he scrubbed a hand over his face and stared at the numbers, trying to make sense of them--seven something, almost _eight_ , fuck, fuck--

"Breakfast," Nate said, and poured it through the pack-sense. He'd told his family he'd meet them at the hotel's breakfast buffet, and assured them that he'd be awake early enough to match them even if they were still on East Coast time. 

He honestly hadn't thought he'd stay in bed past six; if nothing else the sounds of his parents moving around next door would have awoken him. Or they'd have knocked on his door--doubtless they _had_ knocked on his door by now, and gotten no response, even if they called his room they wouldn't get an answer, because he'd just _left_ last night--

"I don't even have _shoes_ ," Nate said aloud, and Bo trotted in to sit beside the bed in silent support as Brad offered him a phone. Nate stared at it, trying to imagine what he could say, and then realized he also didn't know the phone number of the hotel, or even the _name_ of the hotel with any great certainty.

Nate looked over at Brad, frowning. "How did you find us, anyway?"

Brad shrugged. "Only so many hotels where out-of-town families usually stay. And--" This came through the pack-sense, encompassing Brad and Frost, touching the bond between all four of them. _We always know where you are, anyway._

That brought Nate to an utter halt, and the feeling surged up in him, so obvious and clear--and so clearly mutual--that he didn't hesitate before speaking. "I love you, too."

Brad grinned and leaned in to kiss him quickly, hard, before he said, "Here, give me that. The phone number was printed on the shuttle van. It went by twice before you came down."

Brad dialed for him and then handed the phone back, and Nate asked for his parents' room number, bracing himself to apologize for worrying them. As the phone rang he wondered if they even knew to be scared for him. They'd never had a briefing about post-deployment pack-sense deprivation, after all, and he'd always assured them that it wasn't as bad as movies painted it; maybe they'd believed him. Before he could think that through any further, his mother's voice said, "Hello?"

"Mom, it's me, are you--"

"It's Nate," his mom called to someone else in the room, before directing her voice back to him. "We ate without you, did you just wake up? You sound terrible, are you getting sick?"

Nate exhaled, all the anxiety going out of him at the unconcerned sympathy in her voice. 

"We knocked," she added, "but you didn't answer. No one could agree on what kind of time zone schedule you would be on right now, but we thought we should let you sleep--but why are you calling, sweetheart? If it's something contagious it's too late, we probably all caught it last night."

Nate did not look up at Brad; he could feel him laughing silently beside him. "No, it's not that. I'm not in the hotel. I spent the night with--"

And then he froze again, trying to imagine how to explain who Brad was and why Nate had spent the night with him. 

It should be obvious. It should be easy; it should burst out of him with all the delight and ease he felt being here, but anything he said to his mother right now was going to require explanation--a lot of explanation--and he could feel himself curling tight, closing off from the warmth of the pack-sense. Bo pushed halfway up onto the bed, laying her head on his thigh, and Nate rested his hand on the back of her neck, not daring to look at Brad now for entirely different reasons.

"Nate? Are you there?"

Nate closed his eyes. Brad took the phone from his hand and said easily, "Hello, Mrs. Fick? This is Brad Colbert, I'm one of Nate's Marines. He spent the night at my place--we got a little too enthusiastic last night celebrating being home. He still hasn't had any coffee, I think his brain just went offline between one word and the next."

Bo's ears caught his mother's laughter, and her unconcerned, " _Well, it's a lot to celebrate. Would you mind bringing him back to the hotel when he's actually awake?_ "

"Will do, ma'am," Brad agreed, bland and calm, his mere voice giving away no more to Nate than it did to his mom.

"Sorry," Nate said, even as Brad hung up the phone and tossed it down on the bed. He felt chilled with too many kinds of shame at once. "Fuck, sorry, I don't know why I--"

"Hey," Brad said softly, and leaned into him. "Nate, _I_ wasn't sure whether you were actually into me more than heat-shack Stockholm Syndrome would account for until last night. I get that you can't explain that to your mom over the phone."

"Did you," Nate asked, leaning back into Brad, and looking up far enough to see Frost at the foot of the bed, keeping watch while the other three were so profoundly distracted.

Brad shook his head. "There wasn't anything to tell yet. And I won't, without your express written authorization."

Nate snorted and finally looked over at Brad, who was smiling slightly; when Nate relaxed again into the pack-sense, he could feel that Brad was nonetheless perfectly serious. 

Brad shrugged. _Family_.

It wasn't quite the same familiar tangle of emotion Nate would have put behind it; there was love there, and more confidence than Nate had in their ability to understand the wolfthreat, but it was the confidence of having delivered the information in specific briefings. Nate could feel the fractures in Brad's sense of family, old and scarred over but never entirely healed. This was intel Nate had never encountered floating around the pack-sense. This was something Brad held tighter.

"So I get it," Brad said softly. "It's a fucking lot to deal with in between coming your brains out and having your first coffee of the day, and adrenaline's no help when you're trying not to make your mom cry, right?" 

Brad leaned in, and Nate relaxed into a kiss, letting himself feel the way they fit together. This was exactly where he wanted to be, no matter how hard it was going to be to explain to anyone else. Bo huffed out a breath and slipped back off the bed, going to sit by Frost.

"Now come on, I promised I'd bring you back, and you're not kissing your mother with that mouth," Brad said, and Nate let himself be led to the bathroom.

* * *

Brad pulled into the hotel driveway and looked over with a dry little smile as Nate unbuckled his seatbelt and reached for the door handle. Nate could feel the shape of what Brad was about to say, cool and bracing and calm, but he also suddenly desperately hated the idea of getting out of the truck and voluntarily walking away from Brad--even only temporarily, to see his family. 

Brad raised his eyebrows in silent challenge, his smile widening. 

Nate said, "Shut up, you don't like it either," and darted across the space between the seats, bracing one hand on the steering wheel and the other on Brad's shoulder as he gave him a fierce, thorough kiss. 

Brad thought _we're going to get rousted for holding up traffic again_ and Nate bit him just hard enough to silence that line of argument. 

Bo, having let herself out of the truck, greeted Nate's sister Shannon with a playful bark and a wag of her tail. 

"Fuck," Nate muttered, breaking the kiss but not moving away immediately. 

"Not in front of your sister, you fucking deviant," Brad replied cheerfully, and gave him a little shove.

Nate shoved back just enough to show he wasn't being pushed anywhere, and then he turned and slipped out of the truck, his feet slapping down on the cool concrete.

Shannon looked up from petting Bo with a wide, guileless smile. "Hey, Nate. Who's--"

Nate slammed the door and stepped forward quickly to hug her, thinking _Go, go, go_. Shannon laughed and hugged him back while Brad pulled away.

He felt Shannon waving after the truck as it departed, and she pulled back from his hug when he loosened his grip. "Nate? Was that--that looked like--"

Nate pulled back enough to look Shannon in the eye, and her gaze was cheerfully curious. He made himself smile as he prompted her. "Looked like?"

"Looked like that wasn't just some Marine buddy like Mom said you said," Shannon elaborated with a teasing smile. "You know you're back home now, right? There's girls."

Nate's brain seemed to lock up on the abundance of things he wanted to--needed to, ought to--say to that. 

Bo huffed with a scornfulness Nate thought even Shannon could hear, by the sharp look she threw at Bo, who was looking up at Nate. _What would we want a girl for?_

Nate looked down at her and said thoughtlessly aloud, "Kids?"

_Brad's parents adopted him. We can get kids the same way._

Shannon's look at Nate had only gotten more confused. "Nate? What about kids?"

Nate looked up at her, and finally he could find the words. "That was Brad. We weren't making do, and I don't care what my alternatives are."

Shannon's eyes went huge. "Seriously? But you--I mean, I thought--"

"Shieldmates," Nate said simply, knowing that that wasn't going to be enough of an explanation once somebody asked him how they'd met. He couldn't lie about it--well, he could, the same silent lies he'd been telling his family for years, because it was easier than trying to explain sex in the wolfthreat to civilians who only knew what got shown in movies. But he wasn't prepared to keep it a secret from his family for the rest of his life, and the rest of his life was what he was thinking about, now.

"But you," Shannon said, looking away down the road like Brad would come back and explain it. "Nate, you've literally never mentioned his name before today."

"It's complicated," Nate said, glancing around. They were more or less alone on the sidewalk; no one was paying them any attention. "It's new. Can we go inside? Is everybody waiting?"

"Yeah," Shannon said cautiously. "Jen and Dad and I were going to go down to the beach and get out of your hair, but we didn't want to leave without seeing you. But--Nate, if you're shieldmates why didn't he--"

"Because of _this conversation_ ," Nate snapped, realizing a second too late that it came out in his platoon commander's _shut the fuck up and obey me_ tone.

Shannon's wide eyes went wider, startled and hurt, and then narrowed as she dug her heels in. Nate was instantly put in his place, right back to being her baby brother. "That's bullshit, Nate. If he's not even going to stick with you through one awkward conversation with your family--"

Nate gritted his teeth on the temptation to tell Shannon exactly what Brad had stuck with him through, in the last six months--in the last year and a half, all the things Brad had faced down with him ever since they met. He had a sudden sharp memory of Brad standing in the doorway of the _Peleliu_ 's heat-shack, asking _You need anything, sir?_

Nate quashed it almost before he felt it: a sudden desperate need to reach through the pack-sense for Brad, to know Brad was at his back in this, even if he wasn't here. He shut his eyes, holding himself tightly closed, and then his eyes flashed open at a hard impact right on the scarred place on his thigh--Bo's skull, butting against him with a force that nearly knocked him down. Nate felt the bond between them wrenched wide open, and Brad was right there with him in the pack-sense, half-frantic.

_Nate, what the fuck are you doing over there?_

_Nothing,_ Nate insisted, raising one hand to pinch the bridge of his nose and hide his face--or at least keep himself from seeing Shannon's. _I've arrived at the point of wishing I'd talked more to my family about the details of my sex life over the last four years._

 _And you yelled_ , Bo helpfully supplied.

Nate felt the utter steadfastness of Brad in the bond at the same time that Brad was thinking with articulate certainty, _You are on your fucking own there, Fick._

 _Yeah_ , Nate agreed, smiling a little. If he put this off any more Brad would start telling him he was a disgrace to recon and that it was an insult to bitches to call him a shy little bitch, and it would all mean the same thing: _Get on with it. You can do it. I'll be waiting for you on the other side of this._

Turning his attention back to his actual surroundings, Nate scrubbed his hands quickly over his face and then looked up at Shannon, who was biting her lip, her face crumpled with anxiety. 

"I'm sorry, that was awful, I shouldn't have said that," Shannon said quickly. "Nate, you just got back, I shouldn't be--" She darted in to hug him again, and Nate took the path of least resistance, holding on tight and not arguing.

"Come on, let's go inside," Nate said, and let Bo lead the way while Shannon hooked her arm in his. Nate matched her stride and kept quiet, trying to put his thoughts in order. They were upstairs, in the hallway and headed toward their rooms, before Nate stopped, digging his bare toes into the carpet, which was harder and coarser up here than in the lobby. 

Shannon turned to look at him, searching his face, and Nate said quietly, "Don't say anything, okay? Just give me a chance to tell Mom first."

The one upside of all of this was that there was no pack-sense for it to spill into, though Nate would gladly have exchanged the faint hope of temporary secrecy for the ability to just _make_ his family understand this, or to be able to read all their reactions with certainty. 

Even now he wasn't sure what Shannon thought of him and Brad--whether she was only surprised and would accept it in time, whether she really thought badly of him, or of Brad, or of the two of them together. And that was only going to get worse.

For now, though, Shannon gave him a slow, considering nod, and said, "Today, right? You'll talk to her while we're gone?"

Nate nodded, and Shannon put out her pinky to promise. Nate laughed a little, helplessly, even as he hooked his finger around hers and shook on it. After that she turned on her heel, towing him by the hand to their parents' hotel room. 

Jenny teased him a little about sneaking off to get wasted on his first night back, and his mother demanded assurances that he'd had something more than coffee for breakfast, but that was the worst of it. In remarkably short order Nate had been hugged by everyone and Bo had been fussed over, and his father and sisters were going out for the day, to let Nate start some amorphous process of "getting settled."

Nate suspected that this meant that his mother would pull out some apartment listings and set to work on them; she couldn't take him shopping until he had somewhere to put things. But instead what happened was that his grandma asked Bo if she'd like to go for a walk. Nate appreciated the way she asked Bo and not Nate. She'd lived with a wolf for nearly thirty years after she married Nate's grandfather, and she understood this stuff in a way no one else in Nate's family really did.

At the same time, it was very obvious that Nate was being set up for one-on-one time. He didn't argue, just waited it out, suddenly remembering every time he'd thought he got away with something as a kid, only to discover that his mother was simply choosing her ground before she opened fire. She sat down beside him on the couch, now, close at his side. She reached over and curled one hand gently over his, and said in a professionally neutral tone, "Did you lose your shoes last night?"

Nate closed his eyes and tilted his head back. "I thought interventions called for the mass approach."

 _My mom is worried about me_ , he pushed toward Brad, weary and resigned.

 _That's what moms are for_ , Brad returned, not unsympathetic but not particularly concerned, either. 

"I don't think cornered and outnumbered is a very productive frame of mind for you right now," his mom replied calmly. She didn't elaborate any further, waiting for Nate to answer her question or deflect it.

"No, I didn't lose my shoes last night," Nate sighed, giving in to the inevitable. "I went downstairs just to walk a little and unwind before I went to bed, and Brad was--"

 _Waiting for me,_ Nate was about to say, but that phrase dragged everything else in its train: the months of waiting, and how it all began, and the way Brad felt, and Bo and Frost. At the precipice of trying to explain all of that, Nate abruptly remembered Brad saying _not without express written authorization_ and meaning it.

"Nate?" His mother said gently, and it occurred to Nate that he had picked his head up and was staring intently at the TV.

He shook his head and said, "Hang on," out loud in an abstracted tone as he reached for Brad again, trying not to rush it, not anticipating one answer or another.

 _What are you okay with me telling my mom about you?_ The necessity of telling her something--telling her the truth and probably a lot of it--leaked all over the words, but Nate didn't really want to hold that back.

He felt Brad's slightly baffled reaction first--Brad, Nate realized, had staked out a policy of not explaining anything he didn't want to explain. He didn't quite understand why Nate couldn't simply announce their relationship as a fait accompli and leave the rest out. But after an instant's hesitation the answer came back, firm and true. _Whatever you need to_.

 _I need to tell her the truth and the truth sounds like I have fucking Stockholm Syndrome,_ Nate pointed out. 

_If she sends you to a deprogrammer we'll find you and bust you out,_ Brad assured him. _I don't need to be your mom's favorite son-in-law, Nate. I've got your six. Do what you have to do._

Nate hesitated another second, wanting to argue Brad out of trusting him so entirely--wanting any excuse to put this off a little longer. Brad gave him a little shove and took a decisive step away in the pack-sense, leaving him alone again inside his head. In the silence he could feel Bo being quietly anxious and entirely willing to abandon his grandma on the sidewalk if Nate wanted her back. Nate shook his head slightly, telling her to stay where she was, and looked over at his mom.

"Sorry," he said. "I was about to start talking about Brad, and he's a very private person. I needed to make sure that he didn't mind me talking about this to you."

His mom nodded, but Nate saw her neutral expression slip a little, betraying some hope that it was not Nate but Brad who'd had some kind of horrible breakdown necessitating total disabling drunkenness last night. His stomach twisted at that glimpse of how worried she was for him, thinking he'd gotten completely out of control last night. He knew the truth wasn't going to reassure her. 

Nate took a breath, steadying himself to deliver the facts plainly. "Last night when I went downstairs Brad was waiting for me, and his brother, Frost, was waiting for Bo. Brad's a sergeant in my platoon, a team leader under my command, which means that it's against regs for us to be involved with each other sexually or romantically. We'd been waiting until we were at least back stateside and on leave, and that was about as long as any of us could bring ourselves to wait. I didn't even think to come back inside for my shoes, we just went back to his place for the night."

His mom was silent for a moment, absorbing that and no doubt following it through to at least some of the logical implications. Nate was bracing himself to explain about when they'd started waiting, the heat-shack, all of it, when she said, "What are the consequences of breaking those regulations?"

Nate blinked and considered it; it seemed like a pretty remote possibility, next to the danger of battlefield mutiny. He hadn't given it much thought. 

"If anyone actually bothers to make a big deal about it they'll have to go to Brad first, and he'll swear out a statement that I didn't harass or coerce him, which knocks it down to an NJP--non-judicial punishment, not a court martial." 

His mother nodded slowly at that, but obviously didn't find the distinction very reassuring. Nate went on methodically through the possibilities, working them out as he spoke. It was comforting to have a concrete and logical set of things to explain.

"If my CO or the battalion commander really wanted to make a point they could dock my pay or put me on restricted duty, but at most they'll probably write a reprimand for my file and reassign me away from Brad to eliminate the chain-of-command conflict. At that point the rank differential becomes something they keep an eye on but not automatically cause for discipline. But both the company commander and the battalion commander knew months ago how we felt about each other, so it's not going to scandalize anyone now. My CO seems inclined to be supportive. But it doesn't really matter in the long run, because I'm leaving. Bo and I, we're leaving."

"Leaving...." his mother trailed off invitingly, and her tone was cool enough that Nate realized that--although he didn't exactly understand how--he'd been wrong in his never-articulated assumption that he was going to have to cope with his family being unflatteringly pleased about him leaving the Marine Corps.

"I'm resigning my commission," Nate said, on firmer ground here. He'd filed the paperwork; this one really was a fait accompli. "Bo and I are getting out of the Corps. I filed the paperwork in April, while we were still in Iraq."

"Months ago," his mom echoed, and Nate gritted his teeth against the instant defense he wanted to make, waiting for her to ask him what Brad had to do with his decision. 

Once again she avoided the obvious. "You'd always said you intended to make a career of it, that Bo was destined for higher command and you intended to stay in long enough to make that happen. Even when we talked at Christmas you were still talking about the next ten or twenty years."

Nate honestly could not remember anything he'd talked about with his mom, or anyone else, at Christmas. His memory of those days was a blur of pain and focusing all his will on not thinking, or not letting his thoughts out of his own skull.

"We lost heart in Iraq," Nate said baldly, forcing himself not to flinch from it, no matter how close it came to feeling like an admission of cowardice. Better that than telling his mother what had happened--almost happened--on the bank of that river outside Muwaffaqiyah. 

"Some of the things we saw over there--it changed us. We can't do this anymore. I didn't want command that badly for myself. It was the logical path for Bo, and I wanted to give her that. Now she doesn't want it anymore, and neither do I, so we're getting out. We're going to do something else."

Nate had, after all, promised Bo that they would find a way to bring about change, to make things better.

His mom nodded slowly. "I'm not going to ask you to defend that choice. I wasn't exactly pushing you to join the Marines in the first place. But, Nate, it does seem like you're making a lot of big changes very suddenly. You're getting involved with Brad, breaking regs for him, and deciding to leave the Corps all at once, when none of that has ever been what you wanted before now. It's going to be a lot for you to adjust to. You and Bo."

Nate lost all track of how genuinely, sadly worried his mom sounded on those last words; he fixed his gaze down at his own knees, forcing his hands to stay open. He had to take a breath, shaping the word silently, before he could be sure it wouldn't come out too angrily when he said, "Don't."

His mom didn't say anything, and Nate couldn't make himself go on; he was focusing so hard on keeping himself contained, keeping his fury and his sense of slow, quiet, inexorable disaster inside his own skull, that he couldn't even speak out loud.

"I'm sorry, Nate," his mom finally said. He could hear her being careful, but he couldn't reassure her. "Don't what?"

"Don't," Nate repeated, and raised a hand to rub at his forehead, hiding his eyes from his mom. 

"Don't say Bo's name to me like that, like you have to remind me to consider what she needs. She's only an animal to you. She's half of my heart. I can't do anything without considering her. Of course I know what this means for her." A lie. He couldn't know for sure. But he thought he could make it all right, at least. "This is what she needs."

"But is that the same as what you need?" his mom asked, still gently. "You said Frost was waiting for her, when Brad was waiting for you--did you choose them for her, or for you?"

"She," Nate said, and stopped before he said _she chose them for me_.

He still didn't know whether he loved Brad because Bo loved Frost, but suddenly he also didn't know whether that had been the point all along. What if Bo had been resisting strangers since her first heat because she wanted to choose someone _Nate_ could be happy with? She might just never have found a winner until Frost and Brad. He knew her strength in the pack-sense; she could have connected with any wolf she chose, if she chose. But she'd never chosen any of them until Frost.

And at the same time he knew that if he asked, she would only tell him what she'd always told him, wolfishly plain and simple: _they were wrong. Frost is right. Frost and Brad are ours._

"We all fit together," Nate said quietly, hiding away the enormity of even the possibility that Bo had made this happen for him. "Brad and I fit together because she and Frost fit together, and vice versa; that's what we all are to each other. We're--we're _pack_. We're shieldmates."

His mother was silent so long that Nate thought she might just decide to let it all go for the time being; when she spoke again, he could tell that she thought she had.

"So," she said. "Brad is one of your Marines. You met him last fall, then? After you joined recon?"

Nate felt a weird, dissonant burst of delight from Bo, but all he could feel in reaction was a gladness that this meant his own total failure to handle this conversation wasn't getting through to her. He gave a last thought to just saying _yes_ or leaving out the complicated history of how he'd fallen in love with Brad, but--it went back to the beginning, and he wasn't going to lie, not now that the hiding and waiting were over.

"No, we met in Afghanistan," Nate said. "He was already in recon. His unit was in the 15th MEU with us. We didn't work closely together--Brad's team was on another ship for most of it--but when Bo went into heat we were cas-evaced back to one of the ships. Brad and Frost and their team were being cas-evaced at the same time, because a couple of them had been injured. We met on the plane."

He glanced over at his mother, who said with a slight frown, "You never mentioned him. You talked about Rudy and some of the other recon Marines you met, but never him, not even when you knew you were going to recon."

"No," Nate said, and looked down at his hands again. "It would have been--there are some things I've never talked about, since Bo chose me." 

From the moment a four-month-old puppy closed her teeth on his hand and Nate felt and heard her satisfaction as she declared, _Mine_ , there had been things that people knew about Nate from a glance at his sister. Anyone--including his parents, his sisters, and his grandma--could look at Bo and know that sooner or later Nate was going to be mindless with heat and taking it up the ass from whoever the Corps assigned them, as many times as biology and the Corps required it. Civilians never saw the real heat-shack recordings the Corps used for training, but the stuff that went into movies was almost worse. On his first leave Nate had given his parents, almost verbatim, the point-by-point reassurances outlined for brothers of bitches in one of their training sessions, and they'd never talked about it again.

Now, Nate glanced up and saw from the tense, faintly angry expression on his mom's face that she understood which omissions he was talking about. He nodded and returned his gaze to his hands.

"I came out of it liking Brad a lot, but I didn't think anything would come of that. I wasn't going to tell you about what happened in the heat-shack, and otherwise we had hardly any contact."

His mom didn't say anything, and Nate knew he couldn't leave it there.

"It wasn't like--I didn't get hurt at all, that time. Bo doesn't like strangers. That first time--I think I told you that Christmas that her first heat failed. I didn't explain what that meant."

"You looked awful," she said quietly, her voice suddenly going fierce. "You looked--God, Nate, you looked like you'd been--every awful thing you'd promised wouldn't happen when you bonded to a female, you looked like all of it had happened to you. I wanted to--to--"

To Nate's surprise, his mother's hands closed into fists; despite the absence of pack-sense, despite the way he held himself closed, he could feel her protective rage shining between them. She had _that_ in common with Bo, at least; push her far enough, and she would kill for her children like any mother. For him.

"I know," Nate said, setting his hand gently on top of hers. "But actually--I mean, it was terrible, but what happened, that first time, was that Bo wouldn't stop fighting. She rejected every wolf they sent in to us. That meant we both got knocked around a little, but they stopped it without anyone really getting hurt, each time. At Christmas that year I was just worried about her, and--every Marine I met knew at least the general outline of what had happened. I'd heard a lot about it, by the time I came home on leave. I was worried about her, and scared it was my fault somehow, and worried she wouldn't ever accept a wolf and all her heats were going to be like that.

"And in Afghanistan it started the same way. They'd only assigned one wolf for us, an Australian, and she rejected him. Brad--not Frost, just Brad--was on the watch team outside the heat-shack. After they'd taken the wolf and his brother away, Brad came in to see if I was all right. Bo didn't want him to leave, because she could smell Frost on him, but Frost wasn't there, so Brad wasn't actually affected. He didn't--I need you to understand, he didn't push. He didn't even ask. He didn't force anything. But he offered Frost, if Bo and I wanted to try again, and he and I discussed it and agreed. We agreed. I asked him to."

Nate looked up and met his mother's eyes, searching her gaze; her fury had faded into a sadness he couldn't entirely read, but Nate had to make her understand this. 

"Mom, we agreed to it together. He never--I know you've seen movies or read descriptions or something, but Brad never did anything _to_ me. We were in it together. We had pack-sense with each other, and by the end of that day we _knew_ each other in a way that isn't-- there aren't words. But we were _pack_ , even then, even just for a day. It was _good_."

He could see his mom concentrating, trying to make sense of what he was saying, and Nate made himself smile a little as he added, "I didn't see him again until we docked in San Diego, but he came down to the ship every afternoon for a week. He and Frost were the only ones who could get Bo to let me leave the ship for a few hours every day while the pups were still small. He taught me to surf. It was good, it was--we got to be friends in a way officers and enlisted men usually can't. By then we knew I was going to recon, and he helped me know what to expect from the training. And then in August they asked me if I'd mind having him as a team leader in my platoon and I jumped at the chance to work with him."

"And now you're going to be shieldmates," his mom said slowly. Nate could see that she knew he was leaving out something important. He winced, bracing himself for the last of it.

"This last December, Bo's heat," Nate said, and he could see the protective anger come right back into his mom's face. 

"No, mom--I know how this sounds, but the way I got hurt was really my fault. That wasn't anything to do with Brad or Frost, they weren't there when I got hurt. They tried matching Bo with another strange wolf--a Navy officer--and it was going to go really bad, I could tell. Some bitches, after SERE, they get worse about rejecting wolves they don't like, and Bo had already been about as bad as they get. I thought she would kill the other wolf, so I did what they drill us all not to do from the time our wolves are puppies--I got between two wolves to stop a fight. I got clawed and bitten and they sent a whole team in to sedate the wolves and get me patched up, and that was it.

"But my CO had assigned Brad and Frost as the official backups for that breeding, which meant they were under orders as much as Bo and I were. Brad and I--it wasn't fun like the first time. We thought it meant they wouldn't let us serve together anymore, we were--I honestly don't remember a lot of it, except feeling awful because I thought I wasn't ever going to see him again after that, and trying to figure out how we would replace him and Frost as team leaders. Brad was just doing everything he could to take care of me and trying to make it easy for me, but eventually I passed out on him--it was too much exertion with the injuries I had. That scared the hell out of everyone, and they called a halt. 

"It wasn't until a day later that I woke up and found out he wasn't being reassigned, and that was--that was worse in a way. Better, because I still had the best team leader in recon, and--Mom, there are times we would have died if it weren't for him and Frost. They made the difference sometimes. We needed them. If they hadn't been with us in Iraq I don't know if I'd be sitting here talking to you."

For just a second Nate remembered dodging bullets with Bo at his side, Frost giving triangulation from the front of the column, Brad's early warning still reverberating through the pack-sense. He couldn't read his mother's expression at all. 

Nate was trying to think of another argument to make when he was suddenly aware of Bo's presence, startlingly near. She cracked open the bond to reveal what she'd been hiding from him while he was hiding from her. Nate was on his feet without a thought, running over to throw open the door as she darted through to press against his legs. He felt almost dizzied by the sensation of being not alone anymore, even before he saw Brad following her at a more sedate pace, Nate's grandmother holding his arm.

 _Make up to the senior female, right?_ Brad offered with a grin as they reached the door. _We know how to do that._

"I've just been meeting your shieldmate, dear," his grandma said, patting Brad's arm. "He seems like a keeper."

"Yeah," Nate said, vaguely aware that it was hard to shape the words out loud around his grin. "Bo and I have been working pretty hard to hang on to them."

Nate couldn't step away from the door without reaching out to touch Brad--it was a shock all over again to see him like this, fitting somehow into Nate's life outside the Corps, and still a novelty to be _allowed_ to touch him. It felt like a lot longer than a half an hour since he'd been this close. 

Brad stepped in and Nate kissed him, quick and close-mouthed but necessary, and then he stayed right there, pressed close, breathing the same breath. He was vaguely aware of Frost coming in, herding Nate's grandma away; he felt the ache in his knuckles from holding on too hard to Brad, felt Brad's arms around him.

He could feel, also, how thin the veneer of amusement was over Brad's thoughts. _What the fuck were you doing, Nate? I thought we were going to find you shackled to the wall with a bare bulb shining in your face._

_I was trying to explain things. There just--isn't a good way to get there._

The image arrived between them of Bravo Two's Humvees overshooting the road, bogged down in tarry mud. Nate was laughing even as he acknowledged that that was exactly what it had felt like: the slow inexorable sinking of the explanation into a conversational quagmire.

 _Promise you won't tell Ray he's a better driver_ , Nate demanded.

_Ray had the benefit of my navigational skills. An advantage you should also be exploiting, sir._

"Encouraging me to take advantage of the enlisted man, Sergeant?"

"Encouraging you not to get lost in the weeds, LT," Brad muttered, and they scuffled a little, pushing at each other without either of them being willing to let go, stopping only when Bo's thought came sharply to Nate from across the room: _Oh. Crying._

Nate broke away from Brad, hurrying over to where his mom stood by the couch with her back to them, one hand pressed over her eyes. He touched her shoulder gingerly, trying to guess what she was thinking, how that might have looked or sounded bad--how much of that had either of them said aloud? 

His mom half turned toward him, wiping her eyes, her mouth a tense, wobbling line, and he couldn't gauge anything from her voice when she said, "Sweetheart."

"Mom," Nate replied cautiously, watching her face.

Her lips turned up as she met his eyes, tears still leaking from hers. "Next time you want to tell me you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone, I want you to _start_ from the fact that you both light up like flares when you see each other, and he makes you happier than any other human being I've ever seen you with in your life. All right?"

Nate exhaled, feeling an echo of the same relief he'd felt at coming back into the pack-sense. He stepped forward to hug his mom--her arms around him went so tight it was hard to breathe, and he remembered that glimpse of fury, how she wanted to protect him just like Bo with her pups. 

He hid his face against her shoulder and whispered to her alone, "I'm still getting used to being happy."

Her shoulders heaved at that and her arms tightened around him almost painfully, but after another few breaths she stepped back and wiped her eyes again. Keeping one arm around Nate, she turned toward Brad and said, "So, Nate, introduce me to your shieldmate."

* * *

They made it through the next few hours without more drama than Bo and Frost tussling with a few other Corps wolves when they all went down to the beach to find the rest of the Ficks. Watching Bo and Frost move in mated unison was startlingly satisfying; they were as beautifully, obviously deadly as a well-oiled machine gun. The other wolves barely put up a fight, even in play, quickly bowing or rolling over for Bo. The other wolves' brothers looked amused and a little envious, but no one tried to take the wolves from their play until they'd had enough of it.

There was lunch after that, the restaurant pleasantly dim and cool after the dazzling brightness of the beach. Brad was quiet but unfailingly charming to Nate's sisters, solicitous to his grandmother, polite to his parents. He stayed pressed against Nate's side the whole time--they were sharing a bench, which made it easy not to allow a molecule of space between them. Bo and Frost flopped under the table together, lying over their feet and casually sprawling into everyone else's space as well, confident that they were among family, if not pack.

Nate could feel the exhaustion of dealing-with-civilians coming on even faster than it had the night before. He usually started acclimating sooner than this, but that whole discussion with his mom had been more draining than the usual pleasantries of his first few days home, and Iraq had definitely been a bigger strain than anything else he'd yet come back from. After lunch he made their excuses and extricated them while Brad made politely regretful faces and muttered last goodbyes. They headed back to Brad's truck to make their escape.

Brad stopped before putting his seatbelt on. He folded down over the steering wheel and let his shoulders slump, and Nate abruptly realized that the exhaustion he'd felt hadn't been his own but Brad's.

Nate's reaction was an instant mix of chagrined apology--for failing to notice and for needing the rescue in the first place--and alarm that Brad had let himself be put through what had obviously been something of an ordeal for him. 

Brad waved away both without a word either out loud or in the pack-sense. He sat up and buckled up without looking over at Nate, and Nate settled back in his own seat, following Brad's lead. Brad didn't want to talk about it, and didn't want to be troubled with Nate feeling bad about it; Nate knew from his own experience that Brad would have no energy left to discuss anything even with Nate by now. Nate tamped down his own reaction and projected a quiet calm through the pack-sense. He'd certainly had enough practice doing that in the last six months.

When they pulled into the garage at Brad's, Brad took off his seatbelt and then hesitated again, his gaze lingering on his bike. The thought seemed to come more from Frost than from Brad: they hadn't been out for a ride yet. Brad usually spent his first day back in a long ride somewhere, pushing the limits of the bike's top speed and doing his best to get himself lost, though he knew the roads around Oceanside too well by now to ever have any trouble finding his way home.

Nate pushed wordless encouragement at Brad, and Brad did glance over at him. There still wasn't a fully-formed word between them, just Brad's slight wariness. He knew this wasn't what he was supposed to be doing right now, barely twenty-four hours into their shieldmatehood.

 _I'll still be here when you get back_ , Nate assured him, and leaned in to seal the promise with a kiss. Brad's hand came up to cradle Nate's jaw as he gave himself over to the kiss for a moment, and then Brad pulled back and got out of the truck. Nate got out as well, going around to get his bags out of the back as Brad went straight for the bike. Nate heard the wolves get out and separate, pairing off with the humans; he was startled to see white fur in his peripheral vision instead of Bo's desert brindle.

Nate stepped around the truck to see that Bo was standing at the bike's sidecar, waiting for Brad, who was staring at her in bemusement. Brad looked over to Frost just in time for Frost to sit down emphatically at Nate's feet.

 _Exchange of hostages?_ Nate offered, remembering the way Bo had traded Frost's presence for his, back on the _Dubuque_ when she was still denned up with her first litter.

Brad snorted and smiled, giving back a wry acceptance and an echo of Nate's own fond memory, before he bent to fasten the safety harness around Bo, who had gotten into the sidecar. Nate got his bags out of the truck and locked it up, then stood with Frost to watch as Brad and Bo took to the road.

Frost led him to the door into the house, which opened automatically for Frost.

"So now I have shoes, but not a key to the house," Nate observed.

 _Keys_ , Frost assured him, and Nate followed him into the kitchen to find a pair of keys lying on the counter, the only thing obviously out of place. They had a paper tag that said _FICK_ in Brad's block capitals. The edges of the tag were battered, like the keys had been in Brad's pocket for a while, or in a drawer somewhere. If Brad had written the tag today, it would have said _NATE_.

Nate pocketed the keys and dropped to his knees to sling an arm around Frost's neck; Frost cuddled agreeably into the contact, and lasted a full minute before pressing _More to show you_ at Nate. Nate stood up and let Frost lead him onward.

They went to the bedroom first; Nate dropped his bags beside Brad's dresser, and Frost nudged at a few drawers which proved to be empty; there was an invitingly empty space along the wall, beside it, which Nate realized could easily hold another dresser, if Nate didn't want to share. The closet, too, had room for things to be moved in. 

_Laundry_ , Frost suggested, the next destination on the tour and an editorial on the state of Nate's fatigues at once. Nate dug out his laundry bag and followed Frost to the laundry room. Brad's fatigues were still in the dryer, where he'd left them last night when he came to find Nate. Nate had already dumped his own stuff into the washer and was reaching for the detergent before he realized that his uniform was going to smell like Brad's now. The kinds of soap most Marines used were scentless to human perception, but there were a handful of wolf-friendly brands, and the wolves could tell the difference between them. Nate had always used a different one before now. 

His fatigues would smell like Brad's fatigues, which shouldn't really make any goddamn difference. He and Brad already smelled thoroughly like each other, and their bond would be blindingly obvious to anyone with a whisper of pack-sense connection to either of them.

Nate looked down at Frost, to find him waiting patiently, watching Nate. If it were Brad standing here with Bo, Nate knew, she would have been pushing, or at least coaxing, wanting her brother's shieldmate scent-marked in every way he could be. 

_Well, Bo_ , Frost offered. His mouth opened in a grin that showed plenty of teeth, and Nate had to agree with that sentiment on every level. Frost was Brad's brother, and Brad had never pushed him. He'd never asked for anything Nate wasn't ready to offer. Brad had been sure enough to make keys for Nate, God knew how long ago, but he'd only now left them out for Nate to find.

Nate turned and grabbed the detergent, dumping it in liberally. He took Brad's fatigues out and folded them, leaving them on top of the dryer, before he let Frost introduce him to the couch and the array of remotes for the TV.

* * *

When his laundry was done, Nate returned his fatigues to his duffel bag. When Frost lay down across the bedroom door and scrupulously didn't watch, he unpacked his few changes of civvies into the empty dresser drawers. 

He couldn't help thinking as he did that it wouldn't be much to pack up, anyway, if Brad wanted more time, or if it seemed like a better idea for Nate to live somewhere else for a while first.

Frost, without looking over at him, huffed derisively.

Nate raised his eyebrows and said, "Just for that, you're coming with me to get my truck."

Frost did stand up then, just so that he could put his ears and tail down and walk in a cowering crouch all the way to the front door to show how terrified he was of Nate's retribution. 

"You are such an asshole," Nate said, when Frost kept it up all the way to the street. Frost gave a snort that sounded exactly like Brad refusing to laugh and uncoiled to his full height, his tail popping up like a flag as he strolled cheerfully at Nate's side.

Nate had left the truck with Mike's wife, Cara, while they were deployed; she could use it occasionally so it wouldn't lie completely idle for months. According to a letter Mike had gotten, it wound up coming in handy when a series of automotive catastrophes struck Cara and a few of the other Marine wives in the neighborhood. 

They only lived a couple of blocks from Brad, so it was easy enough to walk over. Halfway there it occurred to Nate that he had no idea whether they were actually home--had the girls had school today?--or whether they might be in the midst of a huge party or some other celebration.

Nate reached through the pack-sense, feeling for Ash and Mike's presence, and found them reassuringly promptly. They didn't seem too absorbed in anything Nate couldn't interrupt for the couple of minutes it would take to get his car keys back.

When they turned the corner onto Mike's block, Ash was waiting for them on the sidewalk along with Mike's older daughter. 

"Hi, Sam," Nate said, 95% sure that that was her name and not her baby sister's, while Ash gave Frost a shove. Nate was amused to see Frost sincerely submitting to Gunny's sister's casual facewash. 

"Hi, Lieutenant," Sam replied politely. "Dad says to tell you you're welcome to pretend to be sleeping on our couch all you want but really you have to go home when it gets dark."

Nate nodded. "I just came to get my truck."

"We washed it for you yesterday. You can have some food, too," Sam offered, turning to lead Nate back to the house. "There's lots. And cake."

Mike was standing by Nate's truck, which was parked in the street and had only been washed, not festooned with any welcome-home messages. Cara was a kind woman. 

Mike frowned down at Frost for a moment and then glanced up at Nate with a smile. "Well, that's definitive."

"Bo's idea," Nate said with a shrug.

"Yeah, we all knew who the boss of you four was," Mike agreed.

Nate reached out again through the pack-sense, and found that Bo and Brad had stopped somewhere. Bo was, at this very moment a couple of hundred miles away, making Brad pour water for her at just the right speed for her to drink it out of the air.

Nate rubbed his forehead and laughed. Mike certainly had that right. 

"So we're having more than dinner and less than a party," Mike said, and Nate reached for Ash and Frost's senses to tally up the dozen or so family and friends gathered there. 

Frost took an actual step back, and Nate said only, "Yeah, we already ate."

Mike nodded agreeably and handed over the keys. "You will come over for dinner sometime this week, Nate. Bring Brad. You two have to start somewhere."

Nate snorted. _Oh, we started with my family this morning._

Mike gave a sympathetic wince. _Brad's?_

 _Not yet_ , Nate said. He'd been doing a pretty good job of not thinking about it.

 _Later, then,_ Mike agreed, and Ash herded Sam out of the street while Nate and Frost got into the truck.

At the end of the block Frost looked pointedly around the empty truck and considered how much cargo it could hold. Nate didn't even argue; he just turned in the direction of the storage facility where he'd left most of his stuff six months ago.

* * *

When Bo and Brad came home, Bo was exhilarated, dashing up onto the couch to lick Nate's face and then Frost's and then Nate's again before springing off again and racing out to the backyard with Frost on her heels. Brad hung back a little, still quiet. He was smiling, though. Every line of his body seemed to have been shaken loose by the steady roar of the bike and hours of wind in his face. 

He said, "Dinner?" and Nate nodded and stood. 

They cooked together with the same easy coordination they had during sex or combat, and ate standing up in the kitchen as the sunlight faded. Frost and Bo came in halfway through to retrieve a significant fraction of a deer from the freezer and carried it out to the backyard to eat together. Nate and Brad went back to the couch after they'd done the few dishes, and Nate watched Brad methodically cycle through every single channel in his extensive cable package. 

It was fascinating, and Nate thought that wasn't only shieldmate-blindness talking. Brad actually stopped and watched and listened to every channel, like there might be something important to learn from the home shopping network or kids' cartoons. Nate did pay equal attention when Brad stopped on the weather forecast. It was strange to think they didn't have to worry about shamals anymore, that the temperature wouldn't get above ninety degrees, and no matter how cold it got at night they could come indoors and sleep warm. 

After that Brad didn't hesitate more than a few seconds on anything until ESPN; Nate watched the crawl with equal attention then, too, waiting for the Vets' League capture the flag highlights to cycle up. Two of the Oceanside teams were looking good for the playoffs this year.

Brad didn't actually articulate the thought, but Nate could feel him comparing every wolf who flashed across the screen to Bo, and every man to Nate. He leaned into Brad and tried not to think of how desperately he and Bo were going to need that, or something like it: an opportunity to sink into a pack, pursuing a goal in concert, even if it was only a game. To Brad, he only pointed out _No seniority. We'll get stuck in a Division F team._

"Not for long, if they want to win," Brad said, and then Bo and Frost meandered in, full-bellied and sleepy, and went straight to the bedroom without pausing to see if Nate and Brad were going to follow. 

They did, by way of the bathroom, washing up and getting ready for bed in easy, silent tandem. They were naked by the time they slipped into bed, not in preparation for sex, but for the sake of contact, skin available to skin. They weren't quite touching, just lying parallel and within easy reach, when the drifting thought _this is my side of the bed now_ jolted Nate wide awake.

Beside him, Brad rolled over, but didn't reach out to touch. Nate closed his eyes and didn't look over.

"Nate," Brad said quietly.

"I brought my stuff," Nate said quietly, because he didn't want Brad to lie there and not ask and wait him out. He'd had enough of that with Frost today.

"You brought in one box," Brad said. "You didn't unpack. You're ready to pick up and leave again at a moment's notice."

That gave Nate a strange start. It was what Brad was saying it was--a hesitation to commit entirely to living here with Brad--but it also reminded him of his last days with Jill, and then after Jill. It was like the months of waiting to deploy, something Nate was never going to live through again. Not as the one deploying, anyway. 

Nate looked over, and their eyes barely met before Brad rolled onto his back to stare up at the ceiling. Nate took his turn to watch.

"I'm always going to be like this," Brad said quietly. "This isn't--I don't just mean deployments. I'm always gonna be going away from you."

"Don't talk to me like I don't know you," Nate replied. Heat had cracked them both open the day they met, but Nate had had months now to learn how Brad was mostly closed off, hidden behind the layer of ice that Frost had named him for. "And don't talk to me like I'm asking you to be something you aren't."

Brad did look over then, studying him with a very still, very calm expression on his face. Nate caught a shuffle of images in the pack-sense, where Brad could not have let them slip by accident--the Iceman, the affectionate son, the perfect recon Marine, the boyfriend-not-shieldmate. 

Nate shook his head. "Brad."

"Nate," Brad sighed, and shifted closer. "I want you to be here for me to come home to."

"I will get up and unpack right now," Nate said, though without moving. 

Bo made a distinctly disgruntled _Go to sleep, pup_ noise at him, at both of them.

"I can think of better ways for you to convince me you mean it," Brad said, leaning toward him a little. "If you're not going to sleep."

* * *

The barbecue at Brad's parents' house in San Diego was the fifth day after they got back. Nate felt bad about delaying it--he'd been busy having quality time with his own family until they left on the fourth day, subjecting Brad to one last goodbye dinner the night before--but Brad assured him that that was the traditional interval his family gave him to get his head together after coming home from a deployment before they tried to inflict a lot of people on him. It still wasn't a huge number, really, but it went beyond Brad's parents and sisters and brother-in-law to some aunts and uncles and cousins and an array of grandparents, step-grandparents, and some gentleman friends who Nate couldn't quite parse. 

Frost and Bo were the only wolves, and now that Nate knew to watch for it he could sense the strain in Brad from the effort of interacting with wolfless people. He could see, also, the difference it made when Brad knew everyone present, and everyone present was familiar with Brad and Frost. Brad allowed Nate to move up to eighteen inches away from him, for one thing.

He laughed, for another.

He didn't try to explain anything to anyone. Brad introduced Nate as his current CO and soon-to-be-shieldmate, with a roll of his eyes that easily expressed the flimsiness of that polite fiction. Everyone seemed pleased to meet Nate, and no one was remotely surprised that Brad was to be shieldmated with a fellow Marine, nor did they seem concerned that his CO had moved in with him. Reactions to Bo were varied, but she was on her best behavior, and endeared herself to everyone by bonding quickly and fiercely to Brad's toddling niece, Maddie.

Bo had been following Maddie around for about an hour--Nate was waiting for the moment when Bo either picked the child up by the back of her sundress, or lay down to let Maddie climb on for a ride--when she thought suddenly, very clearly, _I like this one. You should get one like this. Nate could breed with--_

" _No_ ," Nate and Brad barked out in unison, wheeling on Bo, who was across the yard allowing her ears to be flattened with clumsy petting.

The whole backyard went silent. Nate dropped his gaze--the better to _never look Brad's little sister in the eye again, Jesus_ \--while Brad said, "Sorry. Bo was editorializing."

The silence persisted for another few seconds--Bo was unrepentant, basking in Maddie's attention, and Frost was around the front of the house, patrolling the territory and refusing to be involved--until Brad's mom chuckled. "Does she want one of her own?"

"Something like that," Nate said, daring to look up, at the same time Brad cut a sideways look his way and said, "One of _our_ own."

Nate held Brad's gaze for a few seconds, absorbing how not-at-all-upsetting Brad found that idea, aside from Bo's excessively wolfish ideas about their reproductive options. _Oh_.

Brad looked away, but his little smile was leaking all over the pack-sense.

Nate kept a straight face and pushed the thought at Brad, _You know you can't ship them off to boot camp at twelve weeks old when they're human._

Brad smirked and still didn't look over. _Gives you that much more time to make sure they won't choose to spend the rest of their life with someone totally unsuitable._

_Peanut's gonna be fine, Brad._

Brad's smile widened. _You think it's Peanut I'm worried about?_

It was a jarring return to the world outside their bond when Brad's mom said, "Does she miss her pups?"

"Yeah," Nate said, refocusing with an effort. "She had to wean the last litter early, in Kuwait--" and from there it was easy to move into the stories he was already becoming practiced at telling about the pups, and then about Evan. 

Brad interrupted him occasionally--interjecting, elaborating, launching into Evan-stories of his own. The pack-sense kept them from actually talking over each other, but it was still new and uneven. Nate could feel how it would become easy, automatic, how they would finish each other's sentences when they'd gotten a little more practiced. 

Brad didn't look away when he smiled at that thought, and Nate smiled back and carried smoothly on.

Later, Nate resisted the impulse to follow Brad to the head and let himself be left alone among what was, after all, going to be his family. Frost came over and took up a supportive--or protective--stance at his side, while Bo continued to scamper about charming everyone and, Nate noted, keeping their attention more on herself than on Nate. Not particularly self-sacrificing, but all to the good.

It was Brad's dad who took Nate aside, when the group he'd been standing in broke up to refill drinks and nibble at desserts. He just stood there for a moment, studying Nate, and Nate looked back, acutely aware of the space between them unbridged by pack-sense. He couldn't remember anymore whether he'd been so conscious of that gap before he'd met Bo, or if it had felt anything like the same. He had no idea what was coming; he couldn't imagine anyone feeling they had to protect Brad against coercion, but there _was_ the fact that he was Brad's CO....

Finally, Brad's father nodded and smiled. "Thank you, son."

Nate blinked. "Sir?"

Brad's father snorted, suddenly Brad-like despite the total absence of physical resemblance. "Come on, Nate, you'd been doing so well."

"Mark," Nate obediently corrected himself. "I'm not sure what you're thanking me for."

"For Brad," he said simply. "For bringing him home to us. Not from Iraq, I don't mean. I know he knows how to take care of himself out there. We just--he's not usually this comfortable with us. He visits, he attends these things when we all want to see him, but he hasn't been really _here_ when he's here, not for years."

Nate looked down at Frost, rapidly re-evaluating everything he'd seen of Brad in the last couple of hours: the effort he was making, so much eased by Nate's presence offering him a certain point of reference and constant refuge.

Frost looked up at him, watching steadily, and Nate wasn't sure he could explain to a civilian the way that Brad, having found Frost, had needed another bond to balance that one. To be a pack, instead of only a pair, which Nate had needed just as much. 

"We're shieldmates," Nate said finally, as Brad stepped out of the house again. "We bring each other home."

* * *

By the last night of their leave, Nate was starting to feel like he really did live in Brad's house--" _Our_ house," Brad kept insisting, "I'll get you on the deed as soon as we have the shieldmate registration." Nate still felt like he was touching down lightly, like everything was only halfway permanent. He'd unpacked everything he had here, but there were a hell of a lot of boxes with his name on them in his parents' basement back in Maryland. 

But when he and Bo left the Corps, they would still belong with Brad and Frost. Suddenly the horizon stretched beyond that murky borderline. Nate was starting to consider nearby schools where he could pursue another degree while he figured out what exactly his promise to Bo was going to entail doing with the rest of their lives. Most of the application and enrollment deadlines were already past; the new school year was less than three months away. It was strange to imagine his life falling back into that familiar, steady rhythm from the irregular calendar of training and deployments.

But first he had to go back to work and find out what was coming next. 

"No," Brad muttered, reaching out and covering Nate's eyes with one hand. "First you gotta stop thinking and go to sleep."

"Sorry," Nate said, pushing an extra layer of apology through the pack-sense as he drew back, trying to keep the whirring of his thoughts to himself.

Brad's hand slid down to cover his mouth before he'd gotten the whole word out, shaking him gently by the jaw while Brad tugged at him in the pack-sense, drawing him back. 

"I didn't say go away," Brad said, inching closer to him. "I said go to _sleep_."

Nate considered his position for a moment and then gave Brad's hand a very wet, thorough lick. 

"Hm," Brad said, and shifted his hand uncertainly. The possibilities flickered across the pack-sense--press his fingers down against Nate's tongue and into his mouth, or put that helpfully wetted hand to use on Nate's dick. They'd gone to bed naked again, but that didn't mean anything except that they could; neither of them was hard. It was certainly a way to get to sleep, though. "You want?"

Nate considered it. Of course he wanted it--wanted the distraction, the end of thought, wanted Brad as close as could be and lost with him.

On the other hand, they'd jerked off together in the shower this morning and then exchanged lazy blowjobs on the couch in the afternoon, and even that had carried a faint twinge of too-much-too-soon. The third time in a day would be more than a twinge--nothing like the heat-shack, Nate was perfectly sure he _could_ get it up and come again now without any intervention--but....

Nate shook his head a little, and Brad's hand was already withdrawing from him as he did. 

"Can I just," Nate said, rolling onto his side to follow Brad's hand and reaching out for him.

Brad nodded, beckoning silently with his fingers and in the pack-sense, and Nate scooted closer, draping himself over Brad and tucking his face down against Brad's throat. He couldn't really smell anything but the same clean-skin smell they both shared--Bo and Frost were down at the beach, not sharing their senses in any useful way--but he breathed in and out and let Brad's scent-name fill his mind, the solidity of ice after the storm passed.

 _Whatever happens,_ Nate thought, deliberate and clear. _We have this._

Brad's arm closed over his shoulders, and that one thought echoed back between them, with the smell of ink on warm paper and ice on cold ground, until sleep dissolved them.

* * *

They moved around each other as easily as they did every morning, for all that they were doing it earlier and in uniform. It was jarring to look at Brad and see _Sergeant Colbert_ , to feel that automatic twitch of _resist, hide, suppress_ at the sight of him in fatigues. Nate could feel the familiar distant chill starting up around Brad in the pack-sense, and he turned away, pouring coffee for them both.

"Drive separately?" Brad asked while Nate's back was turned--out loud, where the words could be calm and neutral. 

Nate nodded and turned back, sliding Brad's mug over to him. "Depending on how things go, it's... probably best."

Brad nodded and lowered his gaze to his coffee, taking a sip before he asked, equally colorless, "Are you sleeping on Mike's couch?"

Nate stared for a moment and then shook his head. Equally blandly he said, "I'm planning to dazzle them with our obviously fated and irresistible shieldmatehood. Double or nothing, right? They'll come down way harder on me if they think I'm violating regs just for a hookup."

Brad looked up at him for a moment, and then smiled slightly. "Nothing to do with not being ashamed of our relationship or having these romantic notions of martyring yourself for love and refusing to disappoint me by lying about us."

"Purely pragmatic," Nate assured him blandly.

Brad sighed. "It's a good thing no one else can tell you're lying as easily as I can, sir."

"Try to use your powers only for good, Sergeant," Nate returned. 

They exchanged a single coffee-scented kiss, and then Nate headed out to his truck. Bo was perched on the hood, soaking up sunshine while waiting for him with unconcealed impatience.

They made it exactly ten feet past the gate before the battalion XO pinged Nate, summoning him to meet with Godfather immediately. Nate sent back wordless acknowledgement and obedience, saving his resignation and relief for Bo. At least they were getting this over with quickly, without a lot of waiting around for the axe to fall.

 _And_ , Bo pointed out, _you don't have to hear what Ray says when you walk in._

 _We'll get to that_ , Nate assured her, parking the truck and making for battalion HQ.

Capo was waiting for them outside. When Bo bowed he closed his teeth briefly on her scruff, but let her up immediately to follow him to Godfather. She stayed precisely at Nate's side, neither leading nor following. For once in their career, Nate thought wryly, this wasn't actually about _her_ choice in sexual partners.

Bo threw off a warm glow of satisfaction at being totally innocent and nearly irrelevant in all of this.

 _That_ , Nate pushed back, _is not what I said_.

And then they were stepping through the door of Godfather's office, Nate coming to attention and saluting while Bo, for form's sake, bowed again. Godfather returned the salute, and Capo deigned to give Bo a peaceable lick across the muzzle before settling beside his brother's desk.

"Have a seat," Godfather directed, waving Nate to a chair, and Nate obeyed.

"You and Sergeant Colbert," Godfather said, while Nate was still in the process of sitting down.

Nate didn't flinch. "Yes, sir. Shieldmates." 

Godfather squinted at him for a few seconds and then nodded shortly, with a small, satisfied smile. "Good. Hate to think the entire battalion was so wrong in its observations. In that case."

Godfather started laying down paper, pushing the salient points through the pack-sense before Nate could process. _Transfer, effective immediately, to an administrative position in the BRC. Promotion. Separation date, August 4, less than two months away. Shieldmate registration forms._

Nate staggered back up to his feet to brace his hands on the edge of the desk and stare down at the paperwork, but it was all there. It was all happening now, today, this morning, more smoothly than Nate had allowed himself to imagine. The shock of it was somehow just the same as if he'd been facing a reprimand. Worse, because he wasn't prepared for this.

"Gunny Wynn and Ash are staying put?" Nate asked. 

Bo, at his side, caught the drift of his thoughts and sat down sharply. 

"They are," Godfather confirmed. "They'll be getting their new officer shortly, but in the meantime you can hand the platoon over to them."

The _before you step foot out of this office_ was left for Nate to infer. He knelt right there, looking Bo in the eye until she pressed closer, touching her forehead to his. 

They'd done this before. But when Bo had to surrender their infantry platoon, she'd had her first litter of pups to focus on. This time....

 _Frost and Brad stay with us_ , Nate promised her. _They're ours. Always_.

Bo huffed and did it just the way she'd weaned her pups, the way she'd released Evan, the way she'd departed her first platoon: quickly, cleanly, decisively, with no hesitation for a last touch or last word.

The lack of other bonds made their link with Brad and Frost blaze suddenly bright in Nate's perception; a quarter mile away, he felt Brad stumble at the sudden shift in the balance of the pack-sense. _Nate?_

 _Reassigned_ , Nate replied. _See you at home?_

 _Of course,_ Brad pushed back, and Nate could feel the warm assurance of the one bond that remained. They were shieldmates for real, now. 

Nate swept up the stack of paperwork, saluted Godfather again, and headed out to find his new duty station.

* * *

Nate's predecessor at BRC wasn't leaving for another couple of weeks--Nate had the distinct impression that his own transfer had been moved up to get him away from Bravo Two before anyone had to take official notice of his relationship with Brad--so he didn't have much to distract him from tracking the intensity of Brad's mixture of pride, irritation, and pleasure in the explosion of attention he was receiving for his relationship with Nate, now that everyone was allowed to notice.

By noon, Brad informed him resignedly, _I'm going to have to go out tonight. Apparently I am to be congratulated._

_If you get too buzzed to fill out this paperwork I'm sending Bo in to retrieve you._

_Death would be kinder._

Brad turned up under his own power well before dark, radiating uncomfortable delight like heat rising off pavement. Nate passed him his own half-drunk beer and a pen, and after everything was signed they wound up having celebratory sex on the cool kitchen floor. Afterward, while Nate was eyeing a kitchen towel and wondering if he could grab it to clean the splashes of come off his skin without standing up all the way, Brad--equally spattered, but apparently less bothered--was eyeing a cupboard door that didn't hang quite even, contemplating how to fix it.

"I'll do it," Nate said. "In August."

Brad grinned, and sat up and grabbed the towel.

* * *

Nate stood automatically at a superior officer's approach; Bo recognized Astra and darted over to greet him with the puppy enthusiasm she'd never lost for her first CO. Nate saluted Whitmer through a haze of déjà vu. He was holding a BreedCom folder under his arm. 

Nate was dimly aware of the captain he shared the office with being dismissed from the room. Whitmer shut the door, waving Nate back to his seat, and drew up a chair on the opposite side of Nate's desk. Nate couldn't read him through the pack-sense--they were only tenuously connected now, but he didn't think Whitmer would be giving much away even if they were closer. He took the folder from under his arm but didn't offer it to Nate. He also didn't bother pretending he wasn't here for a very specific conversation.

"Bo's been pretty reliable, once a year," Whitmer said. "Which means you're going to be out by the next time she's due."

Nate had been trying not to think about that. Wolves never technically left the Corps, and bitches, particularly, stayed on conditional ready reserve--called up for the duration of heat, pregnancy, and nursing if BreedCom wanted another litter--for as long as they were fertile. And where Bo went, Nate would go with her.

"Normally there's some leeway once a bitch and her brother are out," Whitmer said. "The brother is traditionally allowed to make requests regarding breeding partners: Marines from his former unit, or, if he prefers, a guarantee of strangers. That sort of thing."

Nate nodded. Normally. Traditionally. 

"Bo, on the other hand," Whitmer sighed, and tossed down the folder. "Is a headache."

"Suppressors?" 

"If you were staying there'd be no other choice," Whitmer agreed. "But with you and Colbert making it official and Bo getting the hell out of the command structure, BreedCom does what it very occasionally does after a lot of goddamn paperwork on my part and admits defeat in the face of the inarguable."

He pushed the folder toward Nate as Bo bounced to her feet and bounded over to him. Nate stared at the page, trying to take in at least the bold headings.

 _Establishing permanent exclusive breeding pair_ \--

Nate looked up. 

"Functionally it works out to the same thing most of the time," Whitmer said, smiling a little. "He'll be deployed or something--" 

_Or something_ , yes. Brad had told Nate that there was a possibility he would be exchanged to England to train with the Royal Marines, which was just the kind of long-term assignment that would rate housing Brad could bring his shieldmate along to. Nate hadn't let himself consider what he'd do in England for two years. It was just a possibility, so far.

"And Bo's still gonna be on suppressors any time BreedCom doesn't want to deal with the logistical headache of getting you guys together to make a litter. But it's Frost or nothing for Bo now. Straight yes or no choice."

 _I chose_ , Bo informed Nate smugly. _I got the one I wanted._

Nate didn't realize he'd closed his eyes until he opened one to look at Whitmer, who was giving him an amused look, not without sympathy. "I'll just give you some time to try to... deal with her."

Nate stood, saluting wryly while Astra came over to give Bo a face-licking she barely stood still for, and even as Nate sank into his chair again he was reaching out. _Brad. Good-and-bad news._

* * *

"Okay," Ray said. "Okay, possibly drunk enough now."

Nate looked up from his third beer, squinting to gauge Ray's progress through his fourth. Nate had been waiting for this. It had been fairly clear that Ray had had some specific goal in mind when he insisted on going out drinking together after spending the day playing hangman during PowerPoint presentations about helping your sister cope with separation. 

Apart from the ones he lived with, Nate hadn't seen any of the members of Bravo Two in the month since he and Bo had been transferred away. He knew they needed time to settle in with their new CO, and even more than that he wanted to protect Bo from any regret she might feel in the presence of the pack she'd given up. The pre-separation briefings for brothers of bitches were mandatory and infrequently offered, though, so there had been no avoiding Ray and Navi today. It was a little disconcerting to Nate to find himself so terribly glad that Ray was happy to see him again; he'd always liked Ray, but he hadn't quite realized how much he missed them all. He'd told himself it was Bo who really felt the loss. 

"Question," Ray said, in a decidedly declarative tone. 

Nate focused. "Is this going to be about treating Brad right?"

"That one's not a question," Ray said, shaking his head. "That's more like if you make Brad sad he'll love you anyway and defend you to the death right up until you finally leave him and break his heart and he pretends that it's okay if it makes you happy. Doesn't that make you want to punch yourself in the throat for making him sad?"

"I think that did turn out to be a question," Nate pointed out, and downed the rest of his beer. He'd really been hoping it was about not breaking Brad's heart. That was an easy one; he had no intention of doing that.

"No, I just--fucking," Ray said. 

Nate waited for the actual question, and Ray rubbed his face and said, "I mean, that's the actual question. Fucking. You guys. Because I, like--I know Brad pretty well, okay, and by that I mean I can't actually tell you the exact number of orgasms we've given each other, but we didn't, we never. Fucked. Because that's not--I don't, you know?"

Nate nodded. Other than the heat-shack, the hunt, and Brad, Ray didn't have sex with guys. Even Brad had only ever been for special occasions: post-breeding and on deployments and maybe some other dire contingencies. Nate had never asked the particulars.

"Oh," Nate said. "Hey, do you--on training?" Brad and Frost and the rest of Bravo Two had been gone for four days the previous week, up in the mountains. Nate had received occasional updates on amusing incidents, plus regular nightly complaints about how fucking cold it was, but there were solutions to that.

"What, like--like _last week_ do you mean?" Ray asked, somewhere between startled and outraged. 

"Yeah?" Nate said, wondering if he were outraged himself. He didn't think so. He and Brad were shieldmates, but Brad was going to be away from him for weeks and months at a time, and he wouldn't cut himself off from the comfort of the pack. Shouldn't.

"No," Ray said, "Because for one thing it was cold as fucking balls--"

"My point," Nate agreed, tipping his beer bottle toward Ray. Friction, warmth.

"And for another Brad is a loyal fucking dude and why are you asking me this instead of him?"

"You asked _me_ ," Nate insisted. 

He hadn't asked Brad because Brad would tell him if it was important, and if it wasn't then it wasn't; Nate wasn't going to go prying into Brad's silences. Also, he realized, he hadn't wanted to know for sure that Brad was going without in his absence--but then four days in the mountains wasn't the same as a real deployment. 

"No, I asked you about _fucking_ ," Ray half-shouted. He propped both elbows on the table to make an illustrative hand gesture, one finger pumping in and out of the opposite fist, in case anyone in the bar hadn't heard that.

Nate blinked, and then got it, and then looked away, shutting his thoughts down even from himself. "Why the fuck are you asking--"

"Because I _know Brad_ ," Ray said. "And more to the point Brad knows me, okay? I'm the first guy he knew with a sister, and I'm _not asking for fucking details_ but I'm guessing there's stuff he does for you because he learned it from me."

Nate's brain served up a succession of ways Brad had been kind to him in the heat-shack, especially the first time. Nate was, for the tenth time that day, glad not to share any meaningful level of pack-sense with Ray anymore. 

He pointed one finger across the table. "Butterscotch."

Ray snorted. "Chocolate fucking peanut butter, you disgusting fuck. Yeah. But the thing is, me and Brad, we don't fuck because I don't get fucking fucked when I don't have to, okay? And I don't know what the fuck you're into, but you're apparently at least slightly more into dudes than I am if you're making it permanent with the Iceman, so I just wanted to tell you that Brad's never going to ask. He's probably not even gonna offer. He's gonna just leave asses completely off the fucking table. So just. If you actually want to fuck, you're gonna have to convince him that you're that kind of boy."

Nate sat back, staring, focusing on Ray so he wouldn't focus on anything else. "You're seriously giving me sex advice now."

"It's been a month and a half, have you guys fucked? Even once?"

Nate was closed off, utterly closed. He was ice. He was not going to flinch. "How the fuck is that--"

"So no," Ray concluded blithely. "Whatever, man, maybe you never want to get your dick into anything ever again or have anything in your ass any time before you have to, I don't fucking know, but some people like going all the way. And I thought I should just. Say."

Nate exhaled, making himself ease up. It was just Ray. He was just trying to help. 

"Sure," Nate said after a while. "Good point. Taken under advisement."

Ray studied him for a few seconds and then nodded. It seemed like no time at all, after that, before Frost wandered in looking for them. Nate dragged Ray up from his seat to find Brad chatting with Emily in the parking lot, waiting to collect their respective wolfbrothers. It was still bright daylight outside, and Nate felt dizzy in a different way as Brad tucked him into the passenger seat and took him home.

Later, standing in the kitchen with the blinds closed against the glare, Brad waited until Nate finished his glass of water to ask, "Was it that bad, today?"

Nate shook his head, remembering the interminable PowerPoint presentations, the encouraging pep talks from other retired Marines, the card with heat protocol already tucked into his wallet. Bo had spent most of the day with Navi, running around and tussling with wolves who'd gone on to happy careers in law enforcement and pro sports and assorted volunteer organizations.

"We just--Ray wanted to talk," Nate said. "And he wanted to be drunk first."

Brad raised his eyebrows, and Nate figured there was no time like the present and asked before he could second-guess himself. No point getting drunk for this twice. "Do you like getting fucked when it's not heat?"

Brad didn't answer instantly, but Nate thought he could feel the roil of reaction beneath Brad's cool surface. Unless that was him projecting; Nate's brain and his stomach both sloshed uneasily, trying to anticipate Brad's answer. Nate couldn't even figure out how he would have answered the question if Brad had asked him. It was everything he hadn't been able to say to Ray, or even think about in his presence.

"Do you mean, have I in the past?" Brad asked finally, with a careful neutrality, as though he were really only clarifying an ambiguous question. Nate could almost hear the unspoken, self-protective _sir?_ at the end. "Or do you mean, would I, with you. Or," Brad's tone of voice shaded into overt dubiousness, "would I with you tonight."

Nate waved away the last. Even if Brad were willing to go that far to humor Nate in an idea he'd come up with while drinking with Ray, Nate was in no condition to be any good at it tonight. "I'm asking if you have in the past as a gauge of whether you might in the future."

Brad nodded slowly while Nate tried to work out his own answer, with as much caution and restraint as he could bring to bear when he was just drunk enough to be kind of fuzzy. He knew _he_ had liked it in the past; he remembered some of those times back before Bo's first heat, practicing. Back when he thought practice might somehow be useful. Before he'd realized all the ways things would go wrong.

"But it's different now," Brad said. "It's always going to be different when it's me and you."

Brad opened up enough to let Nate get the fullness of his meaning: a fuck with anyone else could be just a fuck. It could be just somebody's dick and somebody else's ass combining in a mutually agreeable way, better or worse on its own merits. But for them, a fuck was always going to be a little repeat of one of their trips to the heat-shack. There wasn't a way to fit their bodies together that they hadn't done there first, and that was always going to be with them anytime they fucked. Maybe the weight of that would ease, if they had years, decades, to fuck outside the heat-shack and learn to let it be something else, but for now, for that inevitable looming first time, they were going to have to wade through everything it had been before to get to what it might be now.

That swamp was full of mines, and Brad was in no hurry to explore it.

"Thank fucking God," Nate sighed, and stepped in to rest his wobbly head against Brad's shoulder. "I just. I can't even think about fucking you--or you me, either way. I get stuck at thinking about just getting ready. They drilled us on prep, you know? I don't think I can do a half-assed--"

"Ha," Brad said, exactly between Nate's words. 

Nate pressed his knuckles against Brad's stomach in a mere gesture of a punch, but didn't slow his words, "--job. And every time I think about doing it I think about last time and I just--" 

Nate pushed it to Brad, dimly aware that he was maybe more open than he meant to be, but he had to share that knot of dread, the weight of it in his chest, the anticipation of pain and injury, and--though he didn't know it when he was prepping last time--the despairing anticipation of being separated from Brad for good. "I can't. Not in any kind of good way."

"Your briefing today," Brad said, and Nate was aware that Brad wasn't touching him, wasn't doing anything at all to hold him here. "Did they talk about trauma reactions?"

Nate nodded into Brad's shoulder. "Post-breeding can be worse in the absence of a regular unit's pack-sense to help balance out reactions and check destructive thought processes. It's one of the reasons they especially push bitches toward sports and social packs."

"The thing is," Brad said quietly, ducking his head to nuzzle against Nate's cheek, his exhale gusting across Nate's mouth, "we can't balance each other. We shared all of it. Do you remember at the end, last time, right before the medics took you out? It wasn't just that you passed out. It was like you didn't know which body you belonged in. We all flowed together. We're both too close to it. If we try again, we're just going to be repeating all of that between us unless we close off from each other completely, and if there's a way for us to stay closed when we have sex I haven't fucking figured it out yet."

"If anyone could," Nate agreed, patting Brad's shoulder, "you would."

"Thank you," Brad replied dryly, but Nate knew Brad knew Nate meant that as a pure statement of fact. 

Nate considered the rest of what Brad had said. It made sense. It was one of the things that had been hard on the platoon during the invasion: all bunched together like they were, they couldn't get parallax on almost anything that happened just among each other. After the bridge ambush they'd had to reach out to Bravo Three to sift through their memories and make sense of them. To some extent every man got parallax from his brother or sister--wolves were much less emotional about combat, on the whole--but there were things humans needed to share with humans, and Nate and Brad certainly couldn't ask Frost and Bo to spot them through purely recreational sex.

The other possibility flitted across Nate's mind--they could each try fucking with someone else--but Nate remembered Ray saying _Brad's a loyal dude_ at the same time he felt Brad's whole body tense against his, rejecting the thought Nate hadn't intended to share. Nate shook his head quickly, agreeing. He didn't want to try with anyone else, either. There was no one he trusted as much as Brad.

Nate pushed back to look Brad in the eye. "So we just... don't."

Brad shrugged. "It's worked so far."

That was true; what they were doing worked fine. Neither of them was pining away for the lack of a fuck. They had plenty of sex--as much as they wanted and no more--and the novelty of being allowed to get off together on a regular basis was far from wearing off.

"You get bored, we can play dressup games," Brad assured him, with a not-entirely-joking half-smile. "No need to get anybody's ass involved."

"Until we have to," Nate pointed out. This was the downside of BreedCom acknowledging Bo's choice. It bound Nate and Brad to Bo's choice, too.

He felt the flit of thoughts not formed into words, not meant to be spoken, somewhere between him and Brad: _Maybe we won't--it'll be a long time--they won't while we're in England--_ and then Brad said judiciously, aloud, "Until we have to."

Nate, with a resigned sense of the looming inevitability, knocked wood.

* * *

Between his administrative position in the BRC and his upcoming separation, Nate's job involved ungodly amounts of paperwork and effectively no leadership. He managed to get Bo seconded to one of the BRC instructors to be an extra monitor on the training courses, so at least she could run around being bossy in a useful way. It made his workdays a little surreal--at any moment, while reading and initialing yet another list of his post-separation responsibilities or reviewing supply orders, he could reach out to his sister and be in the middle of a ten-mile hike or an obstacle course.

It also meant that he tended to spend the vast majority of every day apart from Bo. When the time for her pre-separation physical came up, Nate set aside a stack of papers he didn't remember reading except that he'd found all of them irritating and unnecessarily repetitive, and went to meet her outside the medical building. He hadn't seen her in six hours, and she wasn't in much better mood than he was, rolling on the ground to try to rid herself of a half-dried coat of mud. 

_Come on, get in, they can hose you off,_ Nate pointed out.

Bo thought mutinous thoughts about how she'd rather just go rinse off in the ocean. She and Frost had been down on the beach every night this week; Nate saw her more driving to and from base every morning and night than he did anywhere else.

Still, they got into the veterinary corpsman's office in good time, and he directed them to a shower station where Bo could get cleaned up before they started the exam. 

The corpsman's brother was sitting in the corner of the exam room when Nate and Bo got there, both somewhat damp. Bo stopped short by the table, and Nate could _feel_ her wanting to snarl at the male wolf. She restrained herself--she was a professional--but the strength of the impulse was telling.

Nate looked down at her as realization dawned. "You're not fucking serious."

The corpsman smiled sympathetically. "It's more common than you'd think. Separation just triggers them sometimes, and she weaned her last litter early, didn't she?"

Nate knew there was no arguing with heat. It happened when it happened, and he'd spent an entire day a couple of weeks ago being warned about how separation could make a bitch's heat cycles unpredictable. He just hadn't realized that meant _now_. He'd spent this morning bickering with Brad about what to have for dinner, settling inevitably on the conclusion that whoever got home first would start cooking something and the other would just have to be faster next time.

He hadn't really expected the answer to the debate to be _bitch pudding_. 

"Huh," the corpsman said. "I don't think I've ever seen this BreedCom code before--but it starts with an A, so you two might as well go on over to the heat-shack."

"Yeah," Nate said, and opened his eyes to walk out after Bo, who was all but prancing her way back out of the exam room. 

Nate forced himself to uncurl enough to reach out for Brad, pinging him wordlessly. He wouldn't be far; Bravo Two was on base today.

 _Nate?_

Nate stopped walking and exhaled; the touch of Brad's thoughts came with an instant rush of concern and affection and thoughts not under the sway of Bo's impending heat. Nate suddenly felt like he could breathe again. This was going to be all right. It was going to be _Brad_. No one would get hurt, and they wouldn't be able to help having a good time.

 _You're going to get pulled away from whatever you're doing within the next hour or so_ , Nate informed him, letting the rest of it leak through unspoken. Brad was open enough to let Nate eavesdrop as he stopped what he was doing and dropped a genuinely impressive string of curses. 

When he ran out of breath, Nate volleyed back, _My feelings exactly. See you there._

 _Ten four_ , Brad acknowledged, as Bo came around and started shoving at the backs of Nate's knees to move him along.

It was the same heat-shack they'd been in back in December. It was the same room, the same rush of air against his bare back as he stepped into the warmth, the same weird give underfoot from the padding. It smelled the same to him, and more definitively, it smelled the same to Bo. 

It didn't occur to Nate until the door was swinging shut to seal them in that they were going to lose pack-sense contact with Brad and Frost. The whine that Bo let out when the connection vanished was echoed by an uncomfortably similar sound from Nate's own mouth. Bo's excited anticipation-- _mate mate mate_ \--dropped into uncertainty, and she came over and stood against Nate's legs, fur brushing his thighs. She only barely retained the dignity not to push against him like a pup seeking reassurance. 

Nate thought for a half-second about going to wash up--thought about getting under the shower and spreading his legs, alone in the heat-shack, waiting for whoever was going to come through the door--and then he slid down to his knees and slung an arm around Bo. He couldn't help remembering December--kneeling exactly like this, holding on to her, hoping he could stop her from killing the next wolf through the door--and he was suddenly, viscerally aware of how impossible it was going to be to stop her from killing someone if anyone other than Frost came in next.

 _You promised_. Bo bristled a little, turning to butt against his cheek. _You said for sure. You said no one else._

"I know," Nate said, leaning his head against hers and speaking loudly enough that the observer had to hear. "It'll be Frost."

 _We are assured of this_ , Nate thought, carefully just to himself. He stayed where he was, watching the door.

* * *

"Hey, Captain, this is your two-minute warning," Brad's voice said over the speakers, after Nate's knees started to ache but before his feet could fall asleep, and Bo sprang away from him to let loose her anxiously-coiled energy in a lap around the room, bouncing off the walls at the corners. Nate sat down as Brad's warm drawl continued. "Less if I'm feeling really motivated to get my clothes off."

Nate looked up and flipped Brad off with a grin, feeling his own relief--his own surge of unabashed love--match Bo's. No clerical error this time, and no last-minute substitutions. No strangers. 

Nate pushed to his feet a few seconds before the door opened and the pack-sense lit up again. Frost rocketed across the threshold, and he and Bo met in a mutual leap. Nate was only barely aware of it, because he met Brad about a foot inside the door. Nate grabbed him, hauling him in, already thinking, _I'm sorry, I didn't think,_ as Brad's arms tightened too hard around him: _don't go away like that don't ever go away_.

They didn't kiss, just pressed together from knees to shoulders, arms locked. Nate tucked his face into the side of Brad's throat and felt Brad's pressed to his shoulder. Neither of them was hard yet, but now that Brad was here Nate could feel the buzz of anticipation--more arousal than irritation, with their mates present--as it echoed back and forth between them. 

_So_ , Brad finally asked, without loosening his grip or shifting away. _Your ass or mine?_

Nate snorted, then found himself laughing out loud. Brad snickered--laughing at him, Nate knew, not at the joke--and Nate shoved at Brad in the pack-sense while clinging to him for balance with his actual hands, laughing harder every time he tried to stop. Brad was laughing right back at him, hoarse shouts of laughter, hands clutching Nate as tightly as Nate was holding him.

They finally stumbled apart, facing away from each other while they caught their breath. Nate wiped his streaming eyes with the back of his hand and made himself speak aloud, just to show he could. "You went first last time. My turn."

Brad nodded agreement, and let Nate drag him along to the shower. 

The shower was big enough to accommodate them both, though it helped to have the pack-sense between them to avoid badly-placed elbows and knees, to say nothing of the grip strips on the floor and handles on the walls. Nate grabbed the soap and then hesitated. He didn't especially need to wash in the normal sense, and even outside the heat-shack he hadn't done the hygiene part of prep with anyone else present. 

Brad reached over his shoulder, putting out his hand palm up.

Nate glanced back at him, the unformed question doubtless as obvious on his face as through the pack-sense. 

Brad offered him a smile; Nate couldn't tell if he could actually see the uncertainty on Brad's face, or if it was only something he could feel, the particular chill of Brad's restraint. "Even if we're starting with your ass, we're going to get to mine. Might as well do the prep."

Nate smiled agreement and squirted a generous amount of soap into Brad's hand before lathering up himself and getting to work. Even now they moved around each other easily, arms brushing. There were the inevitable small noises--and the occasional thud or bark from outside--and the two of them breathing. Nate kept waiting for the awful part to start, for the memories to rush in, but the reality of Brad, here, with him, was too undeniable. No strangers, no fuckups.

Nate rinsed his hand, soaped up again, and said meditatively, "This might not be that bad."

Brad huffed. "You sure you don't want to set that bar any lower?"

Nate smiled, ducking his head and watching the soap spill down his wrist as he worked. "Survivable? Better than that time I went into it with still-bleeding wounds?"

"That's the spirit," Brad agreed, and reached past Nate for more soap. 

When Nate was satisfied, Brad was still working. Trading places would be awkward--Brad had one foot propped against the wall and three fingers in his ass--so Nate just leaned back, under the spray, and waited for Brad to finish. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to be. Brad stepped into the spray, rinsed off, and then washed his hands again, just like Nate always did, in some defiance of logic--and then said seriously, "Now the fun part."

Nate smiled. "I hate to break this to you, but I have no idea when she's actually going to pop. It could be hours yet."

"But we have to be ready," Brad pointed out, leaning close enough to kiss without making contact. "So unless you were planning on just doing everything yourself until you actually need my dick, I think there's something I could help you with."

Images drifted into Nate's mind--remembered sensations and a few suggestions that could only be from Brad--and Nate was conscious of being half-hard and clean and wet and very naked. "Well, if you're volunteering."

Brad reached over and turned off the water, and it was his turn to take hold of Nate's wrist and lead him out. They stopped a few steps out of the shower to dry off, and then Brad stepped out into the big open room and flung out his arm, saying grandly, "Make yourself comfortable."

Nate looked around, considering his options. Bo and Frost had, for the moment, settled in the far left corner, away from the supply cabinets and the doors. Nate chose his own spot, opposite the wolves, and dropped to his knees. Behind him, Brad rummaged in the cabinet and came back with the usual assortment of supplies, plus a couple of towels. Nate dropped onto all fours, but when Brad knelt behind him, he tapped Nate's hip. 

"Face up," Brad said. "We might be here a while."

Nate snorted but complied. It wasn't until he was on his back, legs folded up out of the way and looking up at Brad kneeling over him, that he remembered the last time he'd been in this position--in December, too battered to hold himself up, about to take his first turn getting fucked. He felt Brad remember it, too, even before Brad reached out to slide his hand around Nate's thigh to find the scars that remained there as a reminder. Nate took a deep breath, feeling how it didn't hurt, and wriggled all over, stretching his arms and flexing his legs.

Brad's gaze dropped directly to Nate's ass, and Nate could feel Brad's attention sharpening, focused entirely in the present, now, and bringing Nate with him. Brad shifted his hand from Nate's thigh to his ass, brushing his dry thumb over Nate's hole, and even now--not in heat yet, dry and closed and not remotely ready--Nate couldn't help twitching toward the touch. Brad flicked a look up at Nate, meeting his eyes and then smiling. 

"This," Brad said, "is the fun part." 

He pushed back and dropped down onto his belly, putting his face at the level of Nate's ass, without looking away from Nate's eyes. Brad's grin was filthy and promising, and when he opened his mouth Nate couldn't watch anymore; he tilted his head back and closed his eyes. It was enough to feel it, through his own body and through the pack-sense, as Brad's tongue pressed to his hole, muscle pushing soft and wet against muscle. Nate's breath caught, and he struggled to keep still as Brad licked again and again.

Brad's hand was on his ass, holding him open, and Nate grabbed the back of his own knee to steady his leg. His hips rocked without volition--his dick was heavy against his belly now, throbbing with his quickening pulse. Bo's heat wasn't quite on them yet, but it wasn't like Nate needed that to want Brad. 

Brad kept going slow, though, licking and licking, pressing with his tongue but not forcing it, not working even a slicked finger into Nate. He'd already opened himself up more than this with just soap to ease the way, but Brad was taking his time, tasting, nuzzling at the skin behind Nate's balls. This wasn't prep, just a hot wet invitation, but Nate was almost ready to shove his own fingers in to move things along. 

Nate opened his eyes enough to reach for the lube, which Brad had set down exactly three inches out of his reach. _Dammit_.

Brad exhaled sharply against Nate's ass, which was a startling sensation, and Nate met his eyes. He was definitely laughing, no matter how occupied his mouth was. Nate pushed up on one elbow, splaying his leg over Brad's shoulder, to glare down at him more effectively. _Prep me or trade places, you evil fucking tease._

 _Sir_ , Brad agreed, and the tilt of his head Nate could see was only a shadow of the sharp, acknowledging nod that came through in the pack-sense. Brad pressed a new angle of attack, pushing in with his tongue and making Nate sag with the pleasure of it, the gently probing touch, slow but insistent. Still, he didn't let himself fall flat again until Brad pressed a finger into him, slick and easy. He kept licking, and Nate was a weird combination of turned on and ready to melt into the floor. 

_Or be fucked into it?_ Brad suggested, just as he slid a second finger in beside the first and pressed _up_ inside. Nate surged against Brad's hand, against Brad's mouth, but Brad moved with him as easily here as anywhere else. 

It felt so good--so good-and-nothing-else--that Nate was a little startled when his eyes opened again and found the ceiling of the heat-shack. Prep, right. This was prep. 

"If you make me come before she even starts," Nate managed, with three of Brad's fingers inside him and Brad's tongue still working against his rim, making him shudder, making his dick jerk without either of them touching it, flooding his body with sensation, "We're switching."

 _If I make you come just from eating you out I will definitely allow you to try returning the favor_ , Brad assured him, and Nate groaned out loud and told himself he was going to make Brad stop. In a minute.

Just... one more minute.

* * *

Nate finally did make Brad stop after the fourth or fifth time he backed off with impeccable timing right before he made Nate come. By then they were both too wound up to keep still or try to sleep--and Brad, Nate noted with satisfaction, was as hard as he was with even less direct stimulation. They started out doing competitive yoga--who could remember or persuasively invent a weirder pose and hold it longer--but one stumble or another turned into shoving, which turned into carefully openhanded sparring. They couldn't help anticipating each other's moves, though, so it was something like dancing and something like sex standing up without touching each other anywhere interesting. 

They'd grappled to a stiff-armed standstill--Brad was trying to pretend not to understand the comparison Nate wordlessly drew to _Dirty Dancing_ , but Nate knew perfectly well that he was considering the height of the ceiling and whether they could try a lift next, just for something to do--and then it hit. Like a match striking, Bo's heat flared, engulfing them all, dropping whatever flimsy boundaries they'd still been holding in the pack-sense. 

They both jerked forward--both froze, trying to weather the first rush of blinding _want_. They'd been drilled for this, but experiencing the sudden immersion into heat, all together, all ready to go, was new. They'd always had time to brace against it, before this. 

Nate heard himself speak aloud, and was therefore at least half sure he was the one who'd intended to speak. "Condom."

"Right," Brad agreed. "Fuck."

Nate nodded, and a few seconds after that they managed to push apart, staggering on legs that wanted to fold. Brad hit the ground first, grabbing a condom and tearing open the packet. Nate dropped down over him, straddling his thighs as Brad rolled the condom onto his dick. Nate leaned across him to grab the lube and slicked a handful onto Brad's cock, ending with his hand at the base, fingers tangled with Brad's. Nate didn't even have to look over to know that Bo and Frost were ready, that they had the timing right. He sank down onto Brad at the same moment Frost mounted Bo, and the rightness of it was something that went past sex, past pleasure, and beyond it into something wordless, stealing his breath.

Brad moved under him, his hands clenching on Nate's thighs, and Nate came down enough to feel this: his own body and Brad's, the way they fit together, the sensations echoing between them, being filled, being tightly gripped. Nate put his own hands over Brad's and took over the rhythm, working his ass on Brad's cock, rising and falling at just the right rhythm to leave Brad breathless. Nate knew exactly what he needed, and Brad was nothing but _yes yes yes more_ , spiraling higher and higher, frantic with need. Nate didn't slow down until Brad was coming under him, his body bowing up off the floor.

The rush of orgasm washed through Nate. He held himself utterly still, his hands flattened on Brad's as he looked down at his own so-far-untouched dick, and after the first second he was sure he wasn't going to be rushed into coming just from feeling Brad go off. In the few seconds that followed, when Brad dropped out of the pack-sense, Nate felt as if he were the one who'd disconnected. With only one human body in the mix, Nate was suddenly overwhelmingly aware of everything he was feeling directly from his own body.

He was hard, throbbing, wanting, and Brad's cock inside him felt right, in the way that getting fucked only felt during heat. The sensation of being stretched and filled was almost enough to make him come by itself. But there was, for once, no countervailing pain, nothing to detract from the way it felt good. There was just the slick heat where their bodies met and the added jolt of pleasure every time Brad hit him--just--there. Nate twisted his hips a little, experimenting with the angle, and a sharp, electric pleasure shot through him just as Brad reconnected with a gasp. 

Nate looked down and met his eyes with a grin as he did it again, and Brad tugged his hands from under Nate's, folding his arms behind his head in what might have been surrender if it weren't accompanied by such a satisfied smirk. Nate could feel the truth of it from Brad, a _by all means, do it yourself_ that combined challenge and permission into a cheerful provocation. Nate tipped his head back, letting his eyes close as he moved himself over Brad, finding just the angle and speed he wanted. Once he got it, he kept going until he couldn't stop groaning on every breath, every rise and fall pushing him closer to the brink.

Brad's hands came back when his thighs started to burn, taking a little of his weight without dictating anything, and Nate looked down again with an open-mouthed smile. Brad looked dazed, and Nate knew that his own pleasure was the same as Brad's, that Brad was enjoying this precisely as much as Nate was. Nate knew he could move things along--grab his own dick, or tell Brad to--but he glanced over at the wolves and knew he had every reason not to hurry.

* * *

Nate managed the ideal feat of timing, coming just before the first lull allowed them to break apart. Brad headed to the shower to clean up and relieve himself, and Nate let him have the little bit of space and privacy available. He stayed by the wall to stretch his legs. Riding always seemed like a really good idea until he stopped and the muscle fatigue caught up; still, he couldn't complain about sore thighs, in the scheme of things. 

Brad came over when he was all cleaned up and closed a hand on Nate's ankle, helping him get just the stretch he wanted. 

"So I was thinking," Brad said aloud, and filled in the actual thought in the pack-sense: Brad taking his turn to get fucked right here, up against the wall. He could easily spread his legs enough to eliminate the difference in their heights, and it would be a different kind of repetitive movement, at least. If they were going to try it, now was the time, while they could both still be sure of their ability to stand. 

"Worth a try," Nate agreed, looking over his shoulder at Brad with a little smirk of his own as he switched to stretch the other leg, Brad helpfully spotting him along the way. _Just want me doing all the work twice in a row?_

"I'll make it up to you on your next turn," Brad promised, and offered up a few other ideas. He had, Nate realized, been thinking about this, and that kind of preparedness ought to be rewarded.

"Right then," Nate said. "Up against the wall and spread 'em."

Brad grinned and obeyed, setting his feet well apart and sticking his ass out helpfully, his arms folded over his head. Nate only stopped to admire the view for a moment before he went to grab the lube and a condom so they could get ready for the next round.

* * *

Nate was on his back, both hands braced against the wall above his head so Brad wouldn't fuck him into it, ankles nearly crossed behind Brad's back. He reached up to wipe sweat off Brad's forehead before it could sting his eyes. He could spare Brad that, at least. Brad turned his head, licking Nate's fingers in absent thanks, never breaking the rhythm of thrusts into Nate's ass. Nate brushed his thumb over Brad's lower lip, hiked his legs up a little higher to improve the angle. He let his hand fall to Brad's shoulder and slid it in, tracing the faintly raised skin of the tattoo over Brad's spine, just low enough to stay under the collar of a t-shirt. 

_I should get another tattoo_ , Nate thought, not bothering to try to say it loud while his lungs were being rhythmically compressed. He needed all the breath he could catch. _You and Frost_.

"Yeah?" Brad said, not exactly a question and barely a word, exhaled through a smile as Brad shifted on his knees. _Me too._

Nate's mental image--something simple, similar to the tattoo he had for Bo, maybe even right beside it--collided with Brad's offered vision of his back piece expanded to include an image of Bo alongside Frost, and Nate's face--

" _No_ ," Nate barked out, unable to help laughing with incredulous horror. "No, don't you fucking dare. I will never fuck you again."

"Something else then," Brad agreed with a laugh of his own, and he folded down over Nate, and the warm rush of _I want to, I want this, I want it marked forever_ hit Nate even before Brad's mouth met his, so it wasn't, technically, the kiss that tipped him over the edge that time.

* * *

After the fifth or sixth round--they'd agreed to disagree about the count even before it ended--they selected the very softest of the washcloths from the supply locker and settled in on either side of the cold drinking water tap. Brad, fucked most recently, had first dibs on the cold water, but after he'd pressed the cold wet cloth to his ass it was Nate's turn. He fondly imagined, draping a washcloth over his dick and coiling another to rest around the base, that his erection wilted a little under the chill.

Brad shifted slightly, finding a more comfortable position and incidentally pressing the side of his foot against Nate's ankle, and Nate smiled and tried to think of something that wasn't how much everything hurt and how soon they'd have to move again. He passed through a short chain of things he also didn't want to think about and landed on the memory of that welcome-home gathering in Brad's parents' backyard, and Bo following Maddie everywhere she went.

"When's Maddie's birthday?" he asked aloud.

Nate could feel Brad rummaging through memories and associations--he'd gotten the letter telling him of her birth while they were in Afghanistan, and Nate caught the edges of memories as he tried to place which trip back to base that had been. 

"October," Brad said finally, and he turned his head to give Nate a wearily amused look. "You going to get her a stack of books?"

"You going to get her a tiny surfboard?" Nate parried, but the thought of Brad teaching a toddler to surf--Nate shoved that away along with everything else. Not now, not yet.

"What I really want to do is mod one of those Power Wheel things into a tiny tank," Brad said, letting his eyes slip closed, pushing his tentative plans for modifications to Nate. Turret and all, Nate noted. Sturdy and safe, nothing she would break easily, something she could use to terrorize every other kid in the neighborhood.

"I'm pretty good at the painting," Nate offered, finding himself suddenly nostalgic for those nights at the motor pool, fixing up Humvees with Bravo Two.

Brad pictured a tank in camouflage-patterned pink and purple, and Nate smiled and bounced back the image of sparkly tulle cammie netting. Brad snorted, and moved on promptly to his plans to attach a fully functional Nerf gun. They sat and worked out a parts list and a plan of action until they had to get up and fuck again.

* * *

It was Brad's turn to get fucked. Nate had to open his eyes to be sure of that, had to concentrate to remember which one he was and which sensations were coming from his own body. They'd done the last couple of rounds mostly flat, but now they were both aching and friction-burned from the floor. This time they were kneeling up, Brad leaning against the wall again. Nate leaned against his back, fucking him as slowly as humanly possible.

It was still fucking, though, and they were still undeniably gripped by heat. Even though it was a struggle to move, even though they both hurt everywhere, moving with effort through their mingled pain and exhaustion, it would have been unbearable to stop. The pleasure was as electric as the first time--more, maybe, darkly intoxicating, some layer they could only find like this, flayed to the bone and opened to each other. Nate sobbed a little and sped up, feeling the spiraling build start again. Brad groaned and pushed back against him, the rhythm dragging them both toward yet another climax.

Nate brushed his lips across the bruises his teeth had already left on Brad's shoulder, and Nate felt the shiver that shook through Brad inside and out. Nate licked, and Brad shoved back onto his cock again, making Nate's breath catch, pain and pleasure jolting through him. A few more thrusts, and they both knew that Brad was going to come first. Nate straightened up, closing his hands on Brad's hips to get the angle just right. 

Brad was close enough now that there was no point avoiding the sore places Nate had already left by grabbing him this way before; a few thrusts after that his friction-burns melted into irrelevance. Nate let his senses sink into Brad's body, let the pain disappear as Brad's balls tightened, as the slow-motion lightning of his approaching orgasm crackled through his body.

Nate couldn't help his mind skittering ahead. Not only to his own orgasm, which wouldn't be far behind Brad's--it was impossible to really keep them apart when they were so open to each other--but past it. 

_Maybe this time. Maybe it's almost over._

The thought made Brad moan like it was something physical, and Nate felt something let go in him at the thought--at the _hope_ \--of this day ending at last. The mere idea of it pushed Brad to the brink, and Nate took him over with a last couple of thrusts, driving into him just as hard and fast as he needed.

Brad let out a hoarse, exhausted mutter of "fuck, fuck, fuck," as he came. Nate rested his forehead against Brad's shoulder and held absolutely still, trying to focus on how much the clenching of Brad's ass on his dick hurt, trying not to come at the same time despite Brad's climax sweeping through them both. 

Brad slumped against the wall, panting, and when he dropped out of the pack-sense Nate took advantage of the moment of near-clarity to move them both. He hauled Brad backward and lay them both down as gently as he could on their sides. Brad held himself up enough to be not quite dead weight, but as soon as they were on the floor Nate felt him go limp. 

When the pack-sense returned between them, Nate was confused for an instant by the warm, relaxed blankness of Brad's presence. Then he realized that Brad had--despite being still in heat, still helplessly hard, with Nate still fucking him--fallen asleep. Nate's breath shook a little, a nearly silent laugh, and he didn't bother to ask Brad to move, just rearranged Brad's legs for his own convenience before he started thrusting again, the slow, rocking strokes that were the best he could do like this. He could almost fall asleep himself, he was so tired. The dim drift of Brad's not-quite-dreams beckoned to him like the softest bed he'd ever slept on.

Nate's body kept moving, slogging through this fuck like the eleventh mile of a twelve-mile run, the end almost in sight. His mind followed Brad's, surrendering to everything, letting it happen. 

It occurred to Nate that this was important. This mattered, that Brad had not merely dozed off for an instant but was actually asleep with Nate at his back, with Nate _inside his body_ , halfway inside his _mind_. It wouldn't have happened if Brad were less exhausted, but the fact remained: there was no further either of them could let down their guard.

Nate shifted forward, bracing one hand on the floor in front of Brad's chest, fucking into Brad's unresisting body while Brad dreamed of Nate fucking him somewhere else, anywhere else--on a beach, maybe. The rush of blood in his ears and the endless shushing of the air-filtration fans became the ocean. Brad was dreaming of staring out at the sea through half-open eyes, watching the waves. _And when we're done fucking we'll go surfing_.

 _Just like last time_ , Nate agreed, because that seemed logical. Brad had taught him to surf after Bo's first litter was born. 

_Right_ , Brad agreed. _So hurry it up, the tide's going to turn_.

Nate blinked, half-lifting his head. He could see the wall of the heat-shack, and he was squinting in the sparkle of sun off the waves, and Brad was with him, everywhere. He closed his eyes and came, hips moving in helpless jerks while the pain whited out and there was nothing but the light on the water and Brad.

When he dropped out of the pack-sense the ocean disappeared entirely, jolting him fully awake. Brad mumbled discontentedly and reached backward for him, settling a hand on Nate's thigh. Nate put his hand over Brad's, tugging it up so it wasn't on the patch of floor-burn that extended halfway from his hip to his knee on that side. 

"I'm here," Nate said out loud, even as he backed up enough to slip his dick free of Brad's ass. "Right here."

Brad grumbled again but tipped a little further forward, getting comfortable on the floor while still holding on to Nate's leg. The pack-sense returned, and Nate was halfway in their bedroom now; the fluorescent light of the heat-shack was also early morning light leaking in around the blinds. He could hear Bo and Frost moving around quietly out in the kitchen at the same time he could hear their muffled footsteps on the padded floor of the heat-shack. Nate and Brad were the wrong way around in bed--got swapped during sex, clearly--and now they were both too fucked out to bother moving to their own usual sides.

Nate stayed where he was, curled around Brad, for a few minutes before it registered that this was a lull. Bo and Frost were walking around, which meant Nate and Brad were off the hook for the next fuck for a little while. The lulls had been getting longer, the last few times. The last one had lasted nearly an hour. Maybe this time they could--

Nate looked down as he tugged the condom off his dick and realized that he was going soft. 

"Oh, fuck yes," Nate muttered, turning his head far enough to toss the condom toward the nearest pile of detritus. It landed neatly on top of an empty bitch pudding packet, and Nate felt an irrelevant but undeniable sense of triumph. 

Frost appeared above him before he could turn back over and settle in to sleep with Brad--he could be in bed right now, it would be great, as soon as he closed his eyes. Nate blinked up at Frost, not quite understanding what he was seeing, and Frost lowered his head enough that the bottle of water didn't fall very far when he let it go directly above Nate's face. Nate caught the bottle--room temperature, from the supply closet--and tugged open the top with his teeth, taking a long drink before he turned over and held the bottle to Brad's mouth.

Brad turned his head up to drink, and his eyes opened to slits, the dream of their bedroom fading further. Brad was still too quiet in the pack-sense to be entirely awake, though, and Nate didn't say a word, just made sure he got his share of the bottle of water down. When Nate took it away, Brad lay his head down again--on Bo's flank, this time, as she had slipped between him and the wall while Nate was distracted by the trickle of water down Brad's cheek. Nate drank the last of the water and then tossed the bottle away, and when he had curled himself around Brad again, Frost finally lay down behind him, certain that the pack could all sleep soundly at last.

* * *

Nate didn't realize what was happening until the second time he flinched at a touch on Brad's skin. The corpsmen were giving them their post-breeding checkups side by side in the exit area of the heat-shack. They were definitely out of heat--Bo was lying by Frost in a corner looking satisfied with herself--and the pack-sense between them ought to have subsided to the normal, manageable bond. Instead, Nate felt every spray of disinfectant on Brad's scrapes, every bruise the corpsman prodded. He almost could have missed it--he was getting the same treatment himself--but he happened to be watching. 

_So that's weird_ , Nate observed silently. He schooled his face to give nothing away while Brad's corpsman _tsk_ ed at the raw patch down Brad's shin. That hadn't actually been incurred during sex, just a mishap with the supply cabinet door when they'd both been off-balance. 

He felt the shadow of panic flit through Brad's mind--not actual panic, just the sense that he ought to be panicking at this inability to be apart. They were both too tired to work up a real reaction, though. It was just more of the same thing they'd been through in the last day and a half, which hadn't really been so bad.

 _It'll probably go away,_ Brad offered.

 _Probably_ , Nate agreed. They sat a while longer in silence, carefully not reacting as they shared each other's hurts, waiting for the exam to end.

"One more thing, gents," Nate's corpsman said. "If you could just look at each other for a minute and hold out your left hands in front of you."

Nate obediently turned his head and met Brad's gaze. He knew, seeing himself through Brad's eyes, that he looked just as wearily blank as Brad did, skin gone pale with exhaustion where it wasn't bruised, eyes bloodshot. And still he smiled a little, because there was no hiding right now how--even now, even after going through the heat-shack together--it still made him happy to look at Brad and see Brad looking back.

Brad's smile matched his. _Fucking romantic._

 _I'm told Recon's full of them_ , Nate pushed back.

He barely noticed the hands steadying his hand, or the corpsman's explanation about the blood levels they had to check. He did think that it was nice that the corpsmen had synced up, so that there was no dissonance between the grip on his hand and the grip on Brad's. There was the quick double stab of a finger stick for each of them, so precisely aligned that a flash of wordless suspicion passed between them. 

They looked down to find that Nate's hand--and unpricked finger--were being held steady by his corspman. Brad's hand, with no one holding it at all, was hanging in air in exactly the same position, blood welling up from the needle stick he'd held perfectly still for.

"Well, that's good," Brad's corpsman said. "If you both actually bleed when we stick one of you, we have to keep you here until you're both all the way back in your own bodies. Doubled awareness happens to shieldmates sometimes if they're strong in the pack-sense, and it's almost inevitable if you pull a solo breeding together. It should wear off during your twenty-four hour observation period. If not, you'll be placed on medical leave until it does, just call in."

"I'm sorry," Brad said. "Did you say we could _both bleed_ from one of us being injured?"

"Not at any kind of life-threatening scale," the corpsman assured them, pressing gauze to Brad's finger. Nate took his own hand back from the corpsman who'd continued holding it steady, and Brad's hand jerked slightly, making the corpsman move to keep the gauze pressed down. Nate darted an apology toward Brad and held his own hand steady. "Finger stick is about as far as the body will go with believing what it feels. A serious injury would knock you out of the pack-sense on impact, same as anybody else."

Nate eyed Bo, who dozed pointedly with her head on Frost's flank, obviously much too exhausted to be bothered to control the pack-sense better if her humans couldn't manage it themselves. He felt Brad arriving at the same resigned conclusion. Now was not the time to try to force this to stop.

Nate said aloud, "So, you said we could leave? Sleep at home?"

"Soon as we hand you over to your designated NCO who's taken the basic course in post-breeding aftercare," the corpsman agreed. "Wynn's on his way over now."

* * *

They dozed together in the back of Mike's SUV, stumbled on their own power from the driveway into the house and then into bed on their own proper sides. Nate woke up from time to time--and Brad woke up, which was more or less the same sensation, one of them in bed and half-dreaming while the other walked around. Mike was in the house keeping watch, or Rudy, or Pappy. 

Lovell was there, once, and Nate stood at the kitchen counter eating oatmeal and talking to him about something he couldn't remember after, but he was pretty sure that had really happened. His mouth still tasted like maple, later. Ray turned up, too, but Nate was pretty sure that was a time that Brad had gotten up--Ray had brought him In-N-Out, and Brad leaned one hip against the kitchen table and ate it, letting Navi lick mustard off his fingers between bites while Bo looked on in pointed disdain of any wolf who would deign to lick up fast food condiments. Nate could feel Navi's tongue, but he knew she was licking Brad's fingers, not his, and he could smell the burger better than he could taste it.

 _Oh, good_ , he thought, and Brad said, "Yeah, it should be gone in another few hours," and then went back to whatever conversation he was having with Ray without missing a beat. Nate turned over and buried his face in the pillow, and Frost made an irritated noise and squirmed around, getting comfortable again half on top of his legs.

* * *

Nate was summoned directly to his CO's office for debriefing when he got back on base. It was exactly what he expected, SOP after any heat, but it still felt like a repeat of his first day back after he and Brad had become shieldmates.

The niggling _so now what_ at the back of his mind didn't hurt the resemblance. A pregnant bitch wouldn't be released from active service, nor would a bitch nursing a litter. Nate was going to be in uniform until December; the civilian life he'd thought he was about to embark on was suddenly receding beyond the horizon.

His CO already had the report from the heat-shack observers, so Nate only had to assure him that he concurred with the written account, that his injuries were all minor, and that the strange doubled awareness had worn off. He and Brad were back to normal. 

Nate was confident that he was telling the truth there. They'd checked that morning: Brad had cut himself shaving while Nate was in the kitchen making coffee. Nate had _known_ right away, but it hadn't actually hurt except in the normal sympathetic way. His sympathy had been dampened somewhat by the fact that Brad had obviously done it on purpose, but Nate conceded that it had been of scientific interest and fixed Brad's coffee for him without commenting. He'd been careful not to break the cut open when he pressed his fingers to the small red line, kissing Brad goodbye this morning.

"Guess I don't need to ask if you want him on your exclusion list," his CO said with a little smile. 

Nate's return smile was only half forced. "No, sir."

His CO nodded. "Right. That just leaves what we're doing with you and your sister for the next four or five months until the pups are weaned and you two can separate."

Nate nodded cautiously. He could feel cheerful satisfaction--a sense of things already squared away--in the pack-sense, but he didn't know what the hell that _meant_. Bo shifted a little beside his chair, leaning more firmly against his leg.

"As I'm sure you're aware, Captain," his CO said, still smiling that same in-on-the-joke smile, "Your shieldmate's brother, Frost, was traded to us by the Brits. That's actually one of the things in his and Colbert's favor for this billet with the Royal Marines coming up. Good for a wolf to get to meet his bloodline."

Nate nodded slowly, and he could feel around the edges of the words that this was more or less a done deal, and common knowledge; he had none of the wary hedging Brad kept around the idea.

"You may or may not know," his CO went on, "that our agreement, when we got Frost, was that we would trade back at least one pup from his bloodline, depending on how many he sired. His numbers are getting high enough now that the Corps is happy to trade back more than one, to keep from having too many of his get in one place."

Bo lifted her head, on alert at the hint at where her next litter of pups would serve. 

"The Brits stay a little closer to the Old Ways than we do in the matter of bonding," his CO said, his smile widening. "They like to have their candidates meet the pups before they're weaned, let mama wolves see their pups right off to their brothers when they're ready to wean. But that means if we want to trade them, say, a whole litter of high-quality pups, we're going to have to send a high-quality bitch and her brother to England for three or four months."

Nate started to smile himself. All of England was smaller than the state of California--no matter where he and Bo were stationed, they wouldn't be so far from Brad and Frost that they couldn't see them pretty regularly. Hell, just being in the same time zone would help, and Nate could get a head start on finding a useful way to spend his time in England for the length of Brad's exchange. 

"We go where we're sent, sir."

"I was sure you'd see it that way, Captain," his CO said with a grin. "And as it happens, the Royal Marines want Frost's pups, as well as Frost and his brother. Their training center is in Devon--officers and enlisted both, so the pups will get their pick. And I understand it's about an hour away from Plymouth, where the Royal Marines' 42 Commando is based, so you and Colbert can sort out between you who commutes where."

Bo was shaking all over with happiness; Nate managed to say something polite, stood and shook hands.

 _Nate_ , Brad asked, from half a mile away. _You want to tell me why I can't stop smiling all of a sudden?_

They were close enough to normal, Nate told himself. If they weren't, Brad wouldn't have to be told why.

* * *

Nate wanted to grumble about being woken up in the dark on his day off, just on principle, but Brad and Frost were both practically vibrating with anticipation. The feeling was aggressively contagious. Nate and Brad changed into their wetsuits and ate a quick breakfast; their boards were already waxed and waiting in Brad's truck. Once they were on the road Brad rolled the windows down, letting the muggy warmth of an August night roll in on them. There were still stars in the sky over the ocean when they parked by the beach, but the sky behind them was turning blue with the approaching sunrise.

Brad and Nate walked down to the water's edge together, stretching before they fastened their tethers. Frost and Bo trotted out past them, darting in and out of the waves as they crashed on the shore, but when Nate and Brad started wading in, the wolves split up and trotted away along the beach--Frost went north, Bo to the south, setting up enough distance between them to have parallax in their hearing. They'd be able to track Nate and Brad's locations as well as the waves and any other swimmers, surfers, or other hazards that cropped up.

They were all clear so far, and Nate pulled himself up onto his board in perfect synchrony with Brad a few meters to his left. They paddled out together, and Nate piggybacked on Brad's sense memory nearly as much as he used his own. It had been more than a year since he'd gone surfing. He'd never done it without Brad.

Nate glanced sideways at the sudden glow of possessive satisfaction from Brad, and he couldn't help smiling. "It's true. There's no one else for me."

 _Good_ , Brad thought, without taking his eyes from the approaching wave. _Duck_. 

Nate ducked down over his board to let the first wave wash over him. He could feel exactly where Brad was as they both went under the dark water; they drew breath again at the same time when they both resurfaced. The whitewater on the breaking waves seemed to glow in the light of the false dawn streaming in from behind them, and the stars were hanging in a deep blue sky now, giving way to daylight. 

_Duck_ Brad repeated, and Nate closed his eyes and let another wave rush over him, the world going cool and silent and weightless for a few seconds. He was suspended between the fixed points of his board beneath him and Brad's presence beside him until he emerged into the air again. 

"There," Brad said aloud, and Nate looked where Brad was looking, gauged the ridge of the wave coming in. He watched as the first light of the morning lit it up, clear deep blue beside the brilliant white. They paddled toward it together, gaining speed.

* * *

Brad and Frost went with Nate and Bo to the airport. They unloaded Nate's gear from the trunk together, and then Brad pulled Nate into a hug. Nate leaned into it, holding on tightly and taking a deep breath with his face pressed to Brad's shoulder. They'd be in touch every day until Brad followed him to England, but seeing him on a computer screen or hearing his voice on the phone wouldn't be much of a substitute. No smell, and no pack-sense.

 _Only a month_ , Brad reminded him, while his fingertips dug into Nate's sides like he could physically attach himself and be taken along. _This is deployment with training wheels_.

Nate nodded and realized he had to say the thing he'd been telling himself it would be silly to say. Brad let him go enough to step back and look him in the eye, and Nate smiled. "Happy anniversary."

Brad smiled as his eyebrows drew down, and he let Nate follow his thoughts as he searched for an anniversary they could be celebrating in August. They'd met in Afghanistan in November, acknowledged what they felt for each other this past December, finally got to have what they wanted in June.

"A year ago today, Captain Schwetje asked me if I thought Bo and I could command you and Frost in Bravo Two," Nate said, looping his arms around Brad's neck. "He was all ready to put you in Bravo Three before we told him we wanted you."

Brad's eyebrows quirked up, and he tucked his hand between them, touching his fingers to the edge of the bandage under Nate's shirt, covering his still-healing tattoo. "Well. Look at how that turned out."

Nate nodded, curling his fingers to touch the bandage just peeking out of Brad's collar at the back of his neck. He pressed down just enough for Brad to feel it. "Mostly pain and suffering. But I'd say yes again."

"Good," Brad said. "Because Ray's been talking about going back to school now that he's getting out, figure out where those flux capacitors went wrong. A do-over is a very real possibility."

Nate snorted. "God forbid Ray gets loose in history. The space-time continuum might never recover."

"The thought has crossed my mind," Brad agreed solemnly. "But I have complete confidence in our ability to find each other again."

Nate tugged Brad in for one last smiling kiss. _One month_.

 _Always_ , Brad agreed, and then Bo shoved her way between them. 

She jumped up to put her paws on Brad's shoulders while Nate knelt to hug Frost. When Nate stood, Brad helped him settle his bags on his shoulders and then stepped back with Frost at his side. Bo caught Nate's hand in her teeth and led him through the doors, and Nate was suddenly aware of the wolves pushing their scent-names to each other by way of goodbye, all four inextricably mingled. With the smells of the sea and the desert, ice and ink in his nose, Nate didn't need to look back to see Brad and Frost on their six.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter One: Mildly dubious consent (pack-sense-amplified peer pressure), and animal harm in the form of a wyvern (and an animatronic troll) hunted for sport. Unnegotiated non-monogamy and a lot of people having sex in each other's immediate vicinity in mostly-unspecified combinations.
> 
> Chapter Two: Extremely dubious consent, of the soul-bonded-wolf-in-heat variety compounded by Nate really, really not wanting to have sex with the person assigned but feeling he cannot disobey orders. Nate is also injured in the heat-shack and declines to tap out, continuing to engage in breeding sex while injured and in pain. The breeding is eventually halted when Nate loses consciousness.
> 
> Chapter Three: No special warnings! There are puppies, but nothing bad happens to these puppies ever in their whole lives.
> 
> Chapter Four: Child harm--two boys are accidentally shot by Marines and then brought to them for medical attention (this is GK canonical, and it is also canonical that the boys did get the medical attention they needed and were fine). Puppy death--a very young wolf bonded to an insurgent is killed during a firefight, and Bo finds his body afterward.
> 
> Chapter Five: Mildly dubious consent of the soul-bonded-wolf-in-heat variety, with the particular twist that while in the heat shack, while already in the process of fucking, one partner falls asleep and the other partner doesn't stop fucking him.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [First steps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5666449) by [NightingalesAndHandGrenades (NightingalesAndLions)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightingalesAndLions/pseuds/NightingalesAndHandGrenades)




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